


Fog on the Clyde Part III

by AJHall



Series: Fog on the Clyde [3]
Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Genre: Alternate History, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:13:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 67,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2406443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Polly has to go deep undercover to find out who is behind the New Jacobite Brethren and what their aims are. Joe and Dex, meanwhile, have their own battles to fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Joe and Charlie have a frank discussion, in which Joe says more than he means

"There's something new in the stables I'd like to show you," Charlie said, when the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. Polly blinked at both of them and muttered something about wanting to catch up on some sleep; they had, after all, arrived - stumbling sleepily out of the car Charlie had thoughtfully sent round to the aerodrome where they'd landed - not much after 8.00am that morning. It had been a long night. Joe, who had revived amazingly under the influence of bacon-and-eggs, a hot bath and - thank all the stars - decent coffee, was, however, more than happy to play the part of complaisant guest. Leaving Polly to be shown by the housekeeper up to the room prepared for her while they were having breakfast, he wandered out after his host into the weak sunlight of the calm after the storm through which they had flown.

Charlie barely waited until they had reached the stable-yard - someone had been weeding between the cobbles, Joe noticed, and there was new paint on the loose-box doors - before hissing at him, "Look, Sullivan, what's going on?"

Joe recoiled slightly at his ferocity."What?" 

"That girl you brought with you. She is the one from Nanjing, isn't she? What's going on?"

Charlie was looking uncharacteristically tense; his lips were compressed into a thin white line and his nostrils flared; hard dents appeared either side of them. 

"What?" Joe muttered feebly, again.

"Look, Sullivan, you can do what you like in your own life, obviously. But, for preference, not under my roof. I mean, if you choose to drag me into it - well, anyway, put it this way; have you ever _seen_ my sister angry?"

Joe chose his words with extreme care. "Charlie; I've seen Franky take out a Japanese machine gun post with a mortar fired from her hip."

His friend shrugged. "That's not what I meant. For Franky, that sort of thing simply comes under the heading of "line of duty". I saw her when my toy steam train went off the rails and melted the face off her favourite wax doll. And, believe me, I really don't want to be in the spatter zone if she was going to lose her rag like that again, frankly, Sullivan."

Joe exhaled. "Promise, Charlie, honour bright. Nothing like that going on at all. Quite apart from the fact that what me and Franky had, we had, and trust me, nothing could be deader than those ashes, fond as I am of her. But there really isn't anything between me and Polly. And I just wish you could convince her of that fact, actually, because I'm at my wits end about it."

He must have got the right note of sincerity in his voice, because Charlie relaxed, suddenly, leaning back against one of the stable doors, pulling out a cigarette case and, having offered it to Joe, who refused, lighting up.

"Oh? Sorry if I got the wrong end of the stick, but the way she was looking at you at breakfast -"

Joe groaned. "Don't I know it? Look, Charlie, it's complicated. The short version is; she thinks we are, and we're not."

Charlie blew out a smoke ring."Pretty convoluted, even for you, Joe. Though, come to think of it, you always were better at picking them up than dropping them again. Why don't you just tell her you aren't interested? Or, better still, if you have got someone else, tell her you're otherwise involved. There is someone, isn't there?"

The sudden question flustered him; he was responding almost before he was aware he was doing so. "Well - um - yes, there is, but it's not exactly the sort of set-up where I can blab about it -"

Charlie raised his eyebrows - Joe felt a stab of apprehension - and then grinned.

"Married, is she? Well, don't go getting yourself on the wrong end of some outraged husband's revolver. Though actually, I've always suspected you must be bullet-proof in that direction. Given all the provocation you've offered over the years. Anyway, I really did have something to show you. What do you think?"

And he waved a hand proprietorially in the direction of the corner loose-box, out of which an intelligent chestnut head was poking, and making whuffling noises in their direction, presumably in the hope that they might have something edible concealed about their persons; a hope which proved justified when Charlie produced an apple from an inside pocket, quartered it efficiently with his clasp knife, and held it out to the occupant of the loose-box, which snaffled it off his outspread palm, and started blowing and lipping at his chest in the hope of more.

Joe tried desperately to think of something suitable to say. "Oh! Another horse!" seemed, somehow, rather inadequate.

"It's very - um - shiny. I mean - er - _well-groomed_." Useful recollections of inspecting other men's new automobiles and planes crossed his mind. "It looks pretty powerful for its size."

An instant's thought saved him from the wholly fatuous addition of, "But what sort of horsepower does it actually deliver?" 

Charlie laughed. "OK, relax Joe; I know gees aren't your thing. And I've only got this one on approval, anyway. Rhys talked me into it."

"Not that the Squadron-Leader needed much talking, either, Mr Sullivan," the groom said, materialising behind them with, Joe was amused to notice, the inevitable tray of tack-room tea. "It was something you said to him last time you were here that set him off."

He had, it seemed, been promoted on the strength of it; this time the biscuits were home-made shortbread, and there were scones with jam. But there was an ominous yellow envelope on the tray too. Rhys nodded his head towards it."Came in a few minutes ago. Addressed to Mr Sullivan."

With only the scantiest nod towards Charlie as an acknowledgment to manners, Joe had snatched up the telegram and slit it open with the butter-knife. And his face, it seemed, had betrayed his consternation.

"Bad news?"

He nodded. "The worst. They have been at the safe. They have all it takes to build that weapon. Whoever _they_ are, this time round." 

He looked up; past the intelligent heads, twitching ears and liquid eyes of the horses poking out over the half-doors of the loose-boxes - out across the stable yard, manure heap and all, towards the rolling fields and trees beyond, as they unfolded, partly mist-shrouded, in the golden delicacy of a perfect English autumn morning.

His voice was sombre, heavy with foreboding. "It will be war, if we don't stop it. And I'm not sure we can win this war if it starts, Charlie."

There was a pause, and then the old groom, drawing himself up incongruously into a shadow - though not a parody - of a military bearing, said, "Then it seems to me it's for you gentlemen to see it doesn't start. But if it does, we'll take our positions as ordered. Sir."

"Of course," Charlie said quietly, before Joe could comment, "we'll all do our best." His eye flickered over the old groom, still standing as it were to attention. "Rhys was at Spion Kop, you know."

"Then he'll know just what sort of a fucked up mess things could end up in, if we decide to leave "the Establishment" to sort them," Joe said, in an outbreak of frustrated anger that was wholly foreign to his normal self. Shrugging off Charlie's impeding hand on his arm Joe left the stable yard, walking determinedly towards that distant prospect of rolling fields. He needed to think, and he needed to be alone.

Because despite his airy invocations of "fate of the world" he had not, until now, truly realised what it was he was fighting for. And how slender his chances were of prevailing.


	2. In which Polly does go to the ball and makes an unexpected acquaintance

The Assembly Rooms were cold; the tall, uncompromisingly elegant Georgian windows were not, Polly thought, adequate proof against the cold blast from outside. And her backless biascut aquamarine evening gown was hardly more protective, uncompromisingly elegant as she knew it was (and as she had seen reflected in the eyes of all the men for whose benefit she had displayed it - Joe, Charles, even Rhys and that tiny, tongue-tied boy, the junior servant, whose name she had totally forgotten, notwithstanding that he'd driven them over this evening, though he didn't look old enough to have his licence yet).

Though actually, if she was honest with herself (as she was, more often than anyone ever gave her credit for) she would have to admit that a lot of the evening's chill came from her having to face this particular ordeal alone, without (as she had blithely assumed when the whole thing had been explained to her) Joe at her side.

Joe, inexplicably, had mouthed some garbage about its being more use if she could project herself as being the go-between, the honest broker who might, possibly, talk the Sky Captain and his Legion into aligning themselves with the International Brotherhood of the New Jacobite Order. If offered a suitable retainer. And that her diplomacy would be infinitely more effective were he to be - diplomatically - absent while she deployed it.

So he had left her under the coolly detached patronage of Squadron Leader Charles Cook DFC, at whom she could never look without trying to trace his sister's features in his generally immobile face. Which sister, it seemed, was about to dock in Portland, provoking Joe (on some pretext that her intelligence officer might have something useful to contribute to the current crisis) to take off - probably at that very minute - and head down to the West Country. Which left her having to face the assembled ranks of the British aristocracy and gentry on their own turf, without reserves or back-up fire-power. And with part of her mind distracted by speculations as to whether that relationship really was as over as she'd been given to understand it was. Certainly Joe had been, since her arrival in Britain, more incomprehensibly distant than even that unfortunate misunderstanding in the Legion's flat might account for (and after all, she protested in her own defence once more, all the circumstantial evidence had supported her conclusion; any girl in her position would have thought the same thing).

She didn't have time to worry about that sort of thing for long. On entering the Assembly Rooms they had been assailed by an upper-class mob: the women for the most part horse-faced and formidable, the men all wanting to pile in and exchange greetings with her escort (who seemed to have served with or be related - at least by marriage - to a good three-quarters of them) in an obscure argot of which she felt she was understanding one word in seven, but which all of the rest spoke perfectly and no doubt had done since the nursery.

Her inability to speak the local dialect had, she thought with a quick flush of embarrassment, led to one near-disaster already that evening. On their arrival a white-haired man whose pronounced limp somehow only enhanced his air of bird-like sprightliness, who had been introduced to her only as "the Brigadier, my neighbour" had looked her up and down with an expression which needed no translation, taking her in from the top of her painstaking coiffeur to the tips of her satin dancing-pumps, and, with jaw-dropping boldness, enquired "was she planning to stay long with the Squadron Leader, and, if so, might he have the pleasure of mounting her during the Season, harrumph?"

She had been boggled momentarily into silence, while struggling to come up with a sufficiently icy and devastating response (direct action, her first impulse, having been ruled out in consideration of his white hairs and invalid status) before Charles Cook, in a voice whose sardonic undercurrent betrayed that he was fully aware of the magnitude of the gaffe she was on the point of perpetrating, and which reinforced just how alike he was to his sister, blast her, had said, "It's generous of you to offer to lend her a horse, sir, but I don't think Miss Perkins rides. Do you, Polly?"

At which the nearest of the horsy ladies - who had been introduced as the Honourable Amaryllis Something-or-Other, but who answered to another of these absurd nursery nicknames everyone seemed to be saddled with - Shingles, or Bingles or something - had feigned utter shock.

"Not ride? But darling, I thought all Americans rode. Those glorious wide open spaces you see in the magazines and on the movies!"

Another of those cool, clipped English accents had cut in then."But hardly in New York City, Binksie. Or do you count Central Park as one of those great wide open spaces? Because I believe Miss Perkins is very much an ornament of the great metropolis, rather than the Wild West, what?"

And Polly had looked up to meet a pair of humorous grey eyes, one sporting a monocle, set in a long, pale aristocratic face under a sleek mop of hair that was as fair as her own, and immaculately brushed back from his high forehead. He must have caught the surprise in her face, because he added, smoothly,"It is Miss Polly Perkins of the _Chronicle_ , isn't it? How delightful. Not that it feels as though one is making your acquaintance, of course, after following your columns for so long."

She blinked. Charles Cook held out his hand. "Wimbles. I didn't think you went in much for this sort of thing any more."

The new arrival surveyed him momentarily before shaking hands. "Nor you, for that matter, Pongo. I'm dashed glad to see you here. Though not half as glad as I was when you turned up that time with the aerial recon photos at Staff HQ, to let us know that Brother Boche was concentrating his attentions somewhere else down the line at long last. If you would do me the honour of introducing me properly to your charmin' companion? Can't ask a lady to dance without being introduced, you know."

Smoothly, and with a hint of a grin, Charles Cook went through the formalities. Polly had a struggle to keep a properly unflustered appearance; whereas at home she had, in the line of duty, interviewed Senators, railway kings, film stars, and even, once the United States Vice-President without turning a hair, the younger brother of a Duke (and that, it seemed, a dukedom, it seemed, that went back the best part of half a millennium before her country had even existed) was something quite out of the ordinary. Especially when - as transpired before they had completed even half a circuit of the dance floor (he danced divinely, it turned out) - he clearly knew much more about her than she did about him. 

Not all of it entirely favourable.

"So; what brings you to these parts, Miss Perkins? Thinking of writing an exposé article on 'The English Aristocracy at Play'?" 

Those grey eyes were watchful; her immediate impulse of bantering deflection would hardly pass muster.

"Not quite." She paused, wondering if she should go further. But she hadn't got where she had without taking risks. And it was clear that in this society her dance partner could open any door he chose - if he chose. She could tell that from the sidelong glances the horsy-looking ladies had vouchsafed as they took the floor, and had taken heart that at least there were some areas in which the US and Great Britain were not separated by a common language.

She looked earnestly up at him. "Actually, it's a particular aristocrat I had in mind - who I'm trying to find a chance to get an interview with."

He raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Tell me more."

Polly gulped. _Now or never_.

"Would you happen to know a Sir Oswald Mosley?"

The instant shuttering of those inquisitive grey eyes; his sudden assumption of an expression of amiable indifference like a net curtain blurring out the sharp intelligence of his face, told her she had touched a nerve. She kept her own face resolutely blank, but a little flicker of exultation lit within her. She was onto something, she knew it.

Her partner gave a slight, well-bred cough."Know? Well, a little, I suppose. Know of, certainly. An interesting choice for your interview, Miss Perkins."

She leaned a little closer towards his immaculately starched shirt-front as they revolved smoothly round the dance floor just in front of the orchestra, and breathed seductively,"You know, Lord Peter, the way you said that reminded me of something. There's an old Chinese curse, they told me, when I set off to Nanjing. 'May you live in interesting times'. Was that the sense of 'interesting' you might have had in mind?"

He surveyed her steadily through the monocle, as though, she thought with a shiver that was not all down to the draughty, still only half-full Assembly Rooms, she were a specimen under a magnifying glass. They had completed another half-circuit of the room before he spoke again.

"Y'know, I think some people manage to make their times more interestin' than Nature intended. And not just for themselves, blast them, but for peace-loving idiots like you and me. At least, I trust you're peace-loving, Miss Perkins. You should be, after what you must have seen in the Far East. My congratulations, incidentally, on those articles you sent back. Your photographs of Tojo Hideki, f'rinstance. I confess to being deeply intrigued as to how you managed to take those. Though I suppose every trade has its secrets, what?"

His face was a well-bred blank as he spoke, and of course he couldn't know. No-one knew - not even she herself, come to think of it. Nevertheless, her stomach gave a lurch. Though that particular exclusive had set her reputation as a serious journalist in stone - had permanently pulled up the ladder behind her, protecting her from ever sliding back into the sob-sister, fashion-plate ghetto from which she had clawed her way to her present eminence - she still preferred not to think too closely about exactly how it had come about. And what it had cost.

You make your own luck in this game, someone had told her once, when she'd been green but still determined to make her mark in a tough profession and, come what may, never, ever be forced to go back home with her tail between her legs to the small town of her birth, to face the indulgent smiles of her friends and relations who'd told her from the start that she was aiming too high, that she was looking at the stars and so bound to trip over her own feet and land in the gutter.

All she had done, after all, was give her luck a boost at the right time - she had only intended a ten-minute delay - and been sure that anything she was capable of doing to the plane's fuel line would be spotted and fixed within minutes during the pre-flight checks. And she still told herself that there must have been someone else, a second and more effective saboteur who'd got at Joe's plane after she herself had left it, that the disaster which had happened was not, and never had been, whatever Joe might believe, her fault. 

More as an effort to change the subject than anything else, she said lightly, "Should I be flattered? You seem to have been following my career closely, Lord Peter."

He smiled, distantly."Well, on and off, don't you know. You've written some fascinating things over the years, Miss Perkins. Your interview with my wife, f'rinstance. That was the first thing of yours I read."

Polly looked up, quickly. It was hardly as if she'd interviewed that many English people, and she could have sworn that none of them had been a Lady Wimsey, or a Lady Somebody Wimsey or even a Somebody, Lady Wimsey - blast it, she'd been burning the midnight oil with Debretts for the last three nights, and she still hadn't got the rules anything like straight, and she suspected that the British crept about quietly switching them round on purpose, just to keep people like her permanently wrong-footed.

"I'm not sure I recollect -"

His voice was cool. "No, why should you? After all, it was some years ago. Before we were married, in fact. She's a writer, you know. Like yourself, though mostly detective novels rather than journalism, though she's done some travel stuff and book reviews for the papers, here and there. To keep the wolf from the door, over the years. I'm sure you know how it is. Very tough, bein' a writer, I imagine. Specially for a woman."

Polly nodded. She knew, all right. Though she hadn't expected this silk-lined son of a ducal house to know also. She could feel her face relaxing into a smile.

"But that's so interesting. And your wife, what name does she write under?" 

He looked at her; there was just the faintest possible inference to be drawn from his expression that it was rather gauche of her to need to ask. "Miss Harriet Vane. The detective novelist, you know." His voice continued, meditatively, above her head. "You know, I've always thought it must be a dashed difficult job for a reporter. Writing about detective novels, and making it interestin', without givin' away the plots, what?"

Polly's face flamed. For now she had the name, she could remember very clearly the circumstances. And she had not, after all, solved the problem of how one reviewed detective stories without revealing whodunnit. Rather the reverse, in fact.

It had been about five years ago - no, nearer six - and Polly had been spitting feathers that she'd been sent off to interview some dowdy British 'tec-story writer at all, as there'd been something big on at the time - a war? an execution? an election? After all this time she forgot the details - anyway, she was newly promoted to the mast-head and keen to prove herself on the really big stuff. The boys' stuff. Being sent off on this cosy domestic assignment had looked like a deliberate kick in the teeth; neither the first nor the last of many.

The interview had gone badly from the beginning, almost as if the subject had known that in Polly's mind she was very definitely second-best. Miss Vane had been unremittingly distant and prickly; not, after all, dowdy, but wearing a coat and skirt whose severe correctness of cut had made their own acid commentary on Polly's own more revealing, less expensive, outfit. And her entire demeanour shrieked "blue-stocking" from the outset, as if Polly hadn't already taken the trouble to look up the First from Oxford, and the strings of sycophantic reviews from the London Times downwards, applauding her "scholarly" command of English prose, and neatly turned use of a classical tag or an apt, abstruse, literary allusion. Her eloquent dark eyebrows and compressed, thin, expressive lips had not concealed what she thought about the unsophisticated young reporter confronting her.

Polly had already, by then, had her fair share of brushes with those alumnae of Vassar, Radcliffe or Wellesley employed in the trade who'd contemptuously assumed that four years at some fancy liberal arts school at Daddy's expense would make up for any amount of talent, flair and sheer determination possessed by a little girl from the sticks, with nothing more than a high school diploma and a burning conviction that nothing, nothing whatsoever could prevent her reaching her goals.

This supercilious British novelist with the Oxford pedigree was, Polly had determined within the first few moments of their encounter, and with all the savagery that, an uneasy few years later, she realised that only the very young and inexperienced could have lightly invoked, fully deserving of all she was going to get.

And fate had given her a weapon tuned sweetly to her hand. For after all it was most clearly of interest to the _Chronicle_ 's readers that someone who chose cheerfully to write about the darkest of dark deeds, and crimes uncounted, had herself come within the shadow of the gallows. And accused of the murder of her lover to boot; that would give the piece the frisson of the deliciously unsanctioned for the good ladies who subscribed to the _Chronicle_ from the remoter reaches of Syracuse or Cincinnati. There might even be complaints, published in the Letters column, that the austere _Chronicle_ had dared to interview such a self-confessed Jezebel. Scandal, Polly had learned early, did wonders for a newspaper's circulation. One only had to consider (though not imitate, of course) the career of Mr William Randolph Hearst.

The well-turned phrases had burned from her typewriter, and she'd glowed with all the satisfaction of someone who'd written a honed piece of prose, and so tempered a sword which would cut to the heart of its victim with the least possible waste of effort. Until less than an hour after she'd filed her copy she'd found herself on the Arts Editor's carpet, in an interview that still, if she recollected it unexpectedly during some sleepless night, made her go hot and cold and kick the sheets in shame and fury. His final iteration of the choices before her had been stark: spike, rewrite or resign.

Which was, of course, no choice at all.

She had been determined not to be beaten as she slaved over the rewrite. Relying of the legendary lack of knowledge of Art or Literature possessed by the editor with responsibility for them both, she had taken the opportunity subtly to spike her enemy's guns, revealing as many key plot points of her novels as Polly dared think she could get away with.

At the time she had, resentfully and grinding her teeth for sheer fury, put her editor's attitude down to the advertising power wielded by Miss Vane's US publishers, who also, she found out later, had a stake in the _Chronicle_. Tonight, looking up at her dance partner, and seeing the bubble of privilege within which they moved as they traversed the floor, reflected back from them in the horsy faces on the periphery of her vision, she was abruptly aware of another possible explanation.

In this society Lord Peter could open any door he chose - if he chose. The corollary of which being, she now realised, that he could shut them. Just as easily.

With the benefit of hindsight she thought what that momentary flash of resentment might have cost someone who (she realised now) was after all only another girl struggling to make ends meet by her pen in a man's world, where it was always an effort to make those who had the money to buy understand that it was only the fruits of one's brain that were on sale, and where there were no prizes for coming second.

Looking at her partner, she could almost fancy he had known about all of it, from the prickly hostility of his wife, to her own wounded counter-attack; the haughty defensiveness, and the small, mean retaliation. 

"Anyway," she said, her voice abruptly sounding rather too loud in her own ears, "is your wife with you this evening, Lord Peter?"

He blinked. "Ah, no as it happens." He paused. "Harriet isn't going out very much, just at present." His smile for the first time touched his eyes. "Which, in the case of this particular event on the social calendar, I'm entirely sure she regards as a wholly fortunate coincidence."

Polly gathered her courage together. "What a pity. I'd - uh - rather hoped we might meet again."

That, she was pleased to note, had not been what he had been expecting her to say. She continued smoothly on. "I think - if I were doing that interview today - there are a lot of different things I'd want to ask her. And a lot of things I wouldn't be planning to say, this time around. I'd be obliged if you could tell your wife that, Lord Peter."

His face lit up - his lips parted - she waited for what he would say next -

"Oh, good grief! That idiot boy! What on earth is he doing here?"

A blast of even colder air had blown through the Assembly Rooms. Abruptly, Lord Peter stopped dancing. She - to say nothing of the couple behind them - almost tripped over him. He mouthed a conventional apology, but twisted, looking up at the slight, hatless figure of a blond, jaw-droppingly handsome youth who, wearing a light beige raincoat thrown over immaculate evening dress, was coming down the flight of marble steps leading down from the double doors to the street. 

"Jerry!" Lord Peter muttered. "What in the name of all the saints did a poor, unsuspecting uncle do to deserve this?"

Seeing him thus discombobulated lifted Polly's spirits, with a fizz like that of champagne. She grinned."Why not ask him yourself? After all; it's clearly you he's here to see."

Indeed, as the band came to a stop in a ragged concatenation of false notes, it was apparent that the young man was determinedly making his way towards them, coming to a stop before Lord Peter with an impudent cock of his shoulders and a sidelong grin, which somehow managed to convey a febrile, nervous charm under its apparent nonchalance.  
Her dancing companion screwed his monocle more firmly in his eye and looked repressively at the new arrival.

"And what, Jerry, do you mean by this? It's the middle of Michaelmas term: why aren't you still up at Oxford? Though you may not care to answer that with all the old tabbies in the Shires flappin' their ears within range."

As he spoke, he caught the young man by one elbow, and steered him determinedly off the dance floor and into the relative privacy of the maze of surrounding tables and elegant gilt chairs. Polly, her curiosity thoroughly whetted, followed in their wake.

The good-looking boy's eye lighted on Polly, and an impish smile flickered across his lips."Uncle Peter! You can't keep this charmin' young lady standing drink-less while we go raking through all the dry bones, and before we've even been introduced, too."

His uncle, recognising the diversionary tactic, sighed. "Miss Perkins; may I have the somewhat dubious honour of presenting my nephew, Viscount St George?"

"Call me Jerry," the young man said eagerly, extending a hand. His uncle coughed.

"I should warn you that Miss Perkins lives by her pen, and if you don't want your mother finding out about whatever it is that brings you here via the public press, you might prefer to tell me in private."

Polly fumed inwardly, but the young man made a rueful grimace. "Too late, Uncle Peter; the _Morning Star_ must have got a man onto the next train up to Oxford before I'd even finished my discussions with the Proctors. He nabbed me just as I was leaving the House."

He flashed a quick, sidelong smile at Polly. "If the _Morning Star_ had had the brains to send someone as charmin' as you they might have ended up with a story, rather than being upended in Mercury. I was feeling somewhat uncommunicative at the time he accosted me, you understand. Chap by name of Puncheon; says he knows you, Uncle Peter."

"He does." There was a smile of grim satisfaction on his uncle's face. "Harriet once set a bull on him."

Polly gulped. "Your wife - er - doesn't seem actually to like reporters very much."

Lord Peter looked thoughtfully at her for a moment. "Let's say she's had one or two rather - bruising - experiences at the hands of the Press."

Polly thought privately that it didn't sound to her as though all the bruising had gone in one direction, but opted to say nothing. Lord Peter looked repressively at his nephew.

"Anyway. Give, Jerry. If the _Morning Star_ thought worth sending someone up to Oxford to cover it, you can't have been sent down for any of the usual reasons. So how bad is it? Are you here to ask me to arrange a change of identity and to ship you off to North Africa to lose yourself in the French Foreign Legion?"

Jerry, capturing a couple of cocktails from a passing waiter, and handing one to Polly, grinned across the frosted rim of his glass at his uncle. "It may come down to that, once the Mater gets on to it. Though maybe I'll just join the RAF as a gentleman ranker under an assumed name, like Thingummy."

"A/C Thingummy," his uncle murmured. "I admit it has quite a ring to it."

"But what is it you've done?" Polly demanded, her fingers feeling for her dance-programme and pencil. Over on the other side of the room she could see Charlie signalling to her in the pre-arranged code they'd agreed; the Mosley party must have arrived, and she needed to get down to the real business of the evening, but she was dying for the scoop here, and if the _Morning Star_ had lost it (and were the English aristocracy always so nonchalant about confessions of random poisoning, even of journalists? And where had Jerry got the mercury from, anyway?) then the _Chronicle_ would have it.

Jerry shrugged. "I demolished a bit of Keble."

"What?!" His uncle's exclamation was sufficiently loud to cause heads turn across the room. He moderated his tones and said, "How, Jerry? Just - how?"

"Er, what's Keble?" Polly asked. The two looked at her with identical expressions of politely veiled wonder that a creature so ill-informed could possibly exist.

"It's an Oxford college," Jerry said. "Quite a new one, fortunately. And devastatingly ugly. Looks like a cross between Manchester Town Hall and a Fair Isle sweater. Though actually I don't think the Proggins could have been more unpleasant even if I'd hit somewhere that actually mattered."

His uncle confined himself to observing that Keble, while ugly, had a Master and Fellows who were doubtless fond of it, and added, "But how did you manage it?"

"Well -" Jerry put down his drink and spread his hands explanatorily. "It was the gargoyles' fault."

"And have they been sent down?" his uncle enquired sardonically. Jerry looked uneasy.

"Not precisely. Though one or two did sort of plummet down into the quad when the cable caught them, with this perfectly beastly crashing sound. But old Shutters did quite right to cast it off the winch drum when he did. Another split second and the whole airship would have come crashing down on college. And then the Proggins really would have had something to complain about."

His uncle and Polly looked at Jerry.

"I had hoped," his uncle said plaintively, "that the influence of your tutor might, by this stage in your university career, have infused you with a grasp of narrative structure. Obviously, you subscribe to the modernist school, whereby all attempts to construct a narrative according to a linear or any other identifiable pattern are eschewed with an almost religious fervour."

"If I tried telling a story like this, my editor would kill me," Polly said. She and Lord Peter grinned at each other, having finally and improbably achieved some substructure of common understanding.

"Well, it was like this," Jerry said, in rather a rush. "It all began with Shutters's airship - you do know Shutters, don't you, Uncle Peter?"

His uncle indicated that he was, indeed, acquainted with Mr Shuttleworth. "As a friend of yours with intelligence, imagination, the capacity to apply himself and a few ideas beyond nightclubs and the front row of the chorus he does tend to stand out, Jerry." He took a sip of his own drink. "Much like a phoenix among a flock of farmyard ducks. I'm disappointed to learn he was involved in this caper. Have his studies also received a summary termination?"

Jerry shook his head. "No. Everyone rallied round and lied like troopers. There's no reason the Proggins should ever know there was anyone else on board besides me and the paid crew."

His uncle looked eloquently across at Polly, his eyebrows delicately raised, and then back to his nephew. The Viscount's face flamed.

"Oh, oops! " he muttered. His uncle's smile had a deadly blandness.

"I'm sure that Miss Perkins appreciates that the best way to ensure the exclusivity of this story and your cooperation with follow-ups will be to - gloss over - such part of your indiscretions as implicate others not already affected; isn't that right, Miss Perkins?"

His eyes were narrow and watchful. And she suddenly, abruptly concluded that she did not want to get on the wrong side of this man: so acute, so well-connected, so devastatingly intelligent.

She looked across at them both and infused her voice with its huskiest sincerity. "I won't breathe a word about your friend. Trust me."

Apparently reassured, Jerry started to rattle away at break-neck speed. "Well, Shutters got the airship from his father for his twenty-first - he'd been promised a plane, but he thought the blimp would be better as a platform for testing some of his ideas on - he's a great inventor - always tinkering with stuff and really likes getting his hands dirty - that's why the Mater can't stand him, well, that and the Shuttleworths being new money -"

"Albeit in very large quantities," he uncle observed. "I trust this fashion for private airships isn't going to catch on; I can't see Helen caring for having to stable one down at Denver."

Jerry grinned at him, and Polly was struck, momentarily, by how alike they were, after all. 

"Well, he's very hot on War in the Air being the next big thing to come, and he reads up on all sorts of boffiny stuff about trajectories and civilian vulnerability to aerial bombardment and the like - he's got a bee in his bonnet about the country being really vulnerable to attack if an enemy got control of the air, and everyone having their eye taken off the ball by flummery about Bolsheviks when actually the Russians have got too many problems running what they've got to be expansionist, and the real dangers are much closer to home - you should hear him talk, Uncle Peter; it goes right over my head half the time, but you'd understand him."

"I said he was a rarity among your friends," his uncle interjected.

"Anyway, he'd developed this new sort of winch and harness contraption; he'd got some sort of notion about an air-lifeboat service, and he thought it might be more effective than a Breeches buoy for getting people out of the water, or if they were stuck on cliffs and suchlike. And he wanted a volunteer to test it. And I - well, it was getting to that part of term when I was feeling somewhat short of the readies, and it occurred to me that I could use the chance to pull off a really spectacular set of bets, and have a really challenging set of tests for Shutters to make notes on into the bargain."

"Tell me," his uncle interrupted, "did this proposed coup involve items of bedroom crockery, by any chance?"

Jerry looked at him. "What it is to be such a Sherlock. How the devil did you deduce that?"

Lord Peter sighed. "It derives from my long experience of the essentially conservative puerility of the undergraduate mind-set. So. How many jerries did you undertake to delivery, Jerry?"

"Six. Magdalen Tower, St Mary the Virgin, Sheldonian Theatre, Martyrs' Memorial, Rhodes House and Keble chapel. Keble was the last because we needed to head North as our escape route; the airfield's up there."

He gestured. "Well, it all went swimmingly - drew a huge crowd, chasing after us down through the Oxford streets trying to work out where we'd strike next - some of the sharper colleges got their SCR to take command of the higher vantage points - the Master of Trinity nearly grabbed my boot off me with the handle of his walking stick, when the winch was getting a bit sticky - but then Keble caught us out. I was just descending nicely to position our little gift - and suddenly there was this awful vibration down the winch cable, and the airship started jawing about all over the shop, and I started wriggling like fury, and it turned out that one of the gargoyles on that blasted excrescence of a building had got tangled up with my harness and was holding me fast like grim death to Keble chapel roof."

He paused for breath. "And that was when I realised what the design fault in the whole set up was. You can't self release the cable from the harness end. Well, Shutters must have realised it at the same moment, because he just yelled at me to cover my head and keep as clear as possible, and released the brake on the drum. And every last yard of the blasted cable came down on top of Keble chapel roof. And then I had to sit there cuddling my gargoyle until they finally got ladders long enough to get me down. And, one short but nonetheless unpleasant interview with the University authorities later, me and the University of Oxford decided to terminate our engagement by reason of our irreconcilable differences."

He reached an end to his narrative, and looked hopefully across at Polly. "So. Having told you the whole sad history, shall we dance? You can minister the balm of female consolation to my lacerated and aching spirit."

She looked across the room. Charlie's signals were now becoming even less discreet. It was a tough decision to take.

She smiled sweetly at the Viscount. "Why don't we make it later in the evening? I can see my host waving to me; there's someone here he particularly wanted me to meet. But later, I'd be delighted."

Pausing only to scribble a telegram to the _Chronicle_ and hand it to the waiter with instructions that it must be phoned through immediately, she made her way back to Charlie through the throng. And to the tall cold-eyed man with the small black moustache and immaculate, slicked back dark hair who was standing next to him.


	3. Polly storms the citadel - and, a little late, reflects that the fly, too, usually experiences little difficulty getting into the web

Supper was announced at 11.45pm. Fate dealt Polly a lucky hand with the seating plan. Her quarry was on her left hand side, and the Brigadier, who was at least a known quantity, directly across the table. Charles Cook was on her right, and Lord Peter across the table and no more than four places away. Regrettably, Viscount St George had had to be squeezed in down towards the bottom of the table; well out of earshot though not, as Polly subsequently discovered, outside Making Preposterous Gestures With Napkins range.

Polly rapidly regretted the distance between her and the irreverent young aristocrat. The general talk around her, which had commenced, as was only to be expected, with reminiscences about the killing of foxes, touched lightly on the slaughter of grouse (the prime season for which was past, she gathered), detoured up to the Highlands to discuss the stalking of stags and a further operation connected with the process, referred to mysteriously as ‘gralloching’ which, from what Polly could gather, was definitely not something into which she wanted to enquire too closely, and finally concluded with an analysis of the prospects for snipe and woodcock over the Christmas period. Judging by the enthusiasm with which ballistic technicalities were being rapidly exchanged by everyone within range, Polly did not think that, had she been a woodcock (whatever that might be), she would have considered her prospects encouraging.

In fact, not even in a military mess in the midst of a war-zone could Polly recollect a conversation which was so unremittingly sanguinary. Or so utterly useless for the purposes of her investigation.

In an desperate attempt to keep herself in the hunt (and how accurate was that metaphor in this company?) Polly turned to her neighbour. "I don't see your wife here tonight, Sir Oswald?"

He turned, his excellent teeth visible in a charming but somehow vulpine smile. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a sardonic twist to Lord Peter's mobile mouth, and fumed inwardly in belated recognition that her choice of phrase sounded more than a little opportunistic - actually, given the appropriate absence of charity, a blatant come-on. Sir Oswald, it appeared, thought so too. His knee brushed briefly against the biascut satin under the table. 

"Diana's abroad, alas. Staying to console the exile of two very old friends of ours who - unhappily - are prevented from being here tonight. Still. As our Hebrew cousins say, I believe, next year in Jerusalem, eh? Which London fast seems to be becoming. May I engage you for the Lancers? And for a waltz or so?"

Demurely, she looked down at her dance programme, hanging by its twisted silk cord from her glove risk. With a pang of inward regret she struck through two of the post-supper dances the Viscount had appropriated to himself, and presented it to Sir Oswald. 

"It would be my pleasure."

He smiled - more, she suspected, at the sight of the struck-through names on her programme than at his own in pride of place. And then, as though a piece of business had been concluded and so freed him to move on to more important things, he leant across the supper table towards Lord Peter. Even given the distance across the elegantly set white-linen draped table Polly thought she detected a slight increase in formality in Lord Peter’s demeanour.

“You and Denver shootin’ at Sandringham this Christmas, Wimsey? Shouldn’t be any reason this year for His Majesty not to reinstate the big shoots they used to have, back in the old'un's days.”

Lord Peter raised his eyebrows. “You hadn’t heard?”

Polly thought she detected a faint but insultingly detectable lack of surprise in his tone.

An angry flush rose on Mosley’s cheek; he had, it appeared, caught the sub-text. “Heard what?”

“Drains,” Lord Peter said succinctly. “They’ve finally decided that the pestilential cesspit that constitutes the Sandringham drainage system has indulged in its last blockage. It all has to go, by Imperial fiat. So the tradition of ages is displaced, and His Majesty is to winter at Balmoral, with all the Family.”

Momentarily Polly detected a calculating expression cross Mosley’s face. There was, if she had ever trusted her instincts before, more about this conversation than met the eye.  
Anyway, at least it wasn’t about killing something with fur, feathers or antlers.

She made her voice lightly interrogative. “Isn’t that high treason, or something? Revealing the hideous secrets of the Sandringham plumbing to all and sundry?”

Lord Peter looked the table up and down, and then leant across towards Polly, with an exaggeratedly conspiratorial wink. “Hush! Don’t let the Master overhear you, O untutored child of the boundless prairies. He would feel it reflected on the honour of the Hunt. This is not an event open to All. And very definitely not to Sundry.”

“Besides,” a high bored voice broke in from the other side of Mosley, “the fact that the Royal plumbing in all the royal residences is a disgrace isn’t any kind of secret, let alone a state one. 'M surprised only the Prince Consort died of typhoid. Well do I remember my Presentation when I was a deb; we were told on pain of death not to drink anything beforehand, but they still kept us waiting around for so long that everyone had her legs crossed, and eventually we were trooped off en crocodil by the chief dragon of the bedchamber down about forty miles of Buckingham Palace corridors, each draughtier than the last, and even then the best they could come up with was a chamber pot behind a chinese screen. Darling, I couldn’t possibly have a light, could I?”

A gilt-tipped cigarette in an amber holder was waved vaguely under Sir Oswald’s nose.

His smile was tight-lipped. “Of course, Binksie. But you'll have to wait until after the Loyal Toast.”

The Hon Amaryllis wrinkled her nose. “Oh no! Don’t tell us the Master has decided to subject us all to that frightful rigmarole? And speeches as well? Oh, too, too weary-making. Can’t someone muzzle him before he starts?”

Before anyone could put this suggestion into practice there was the tinkle of a fork being rattled against the stem of a wine-glass, and the florid-faced man to whom Polly had been introduced in the earlier part of the evening got to his feet, to discourse for the best part of twenty minutes on - Polly was by now unsurprised to learn - the theory, practice and downright moral obligation of pursuing foxes.

All that being said, some other bigwig got to his feet to reinforce the salient points of the previous discussion, for a further ten minutes.

Then the Master laboriously got back to his feet to deliver a précis of what had gone before, for those who might be assumed to have been asleep during the whole.

Much to her surprise, Polly noticed Sir Oswald pull out a propelling pencil and scribble something on his cuff during the final part of the peroration. She tried to crane her head unobtrusively, but could make nothing of it in the dim light of the candles; it might have been nothing more than three wavy lines one above another for all she could see in the brief glimpse before he pulled his sleeve down to cover the cuff.

The Master reached his peroration - whatever it might have been. He picked up his glass. “Lord Lieutenant; Your Grace; my lords, ladies and gentlemen: the King!”

They were all on their feet, pledging, it suddenly occurred to Polly, a slight, shy, stuttering figurehead to whom she owed no natural allegiance, and who was only in the position he was by accident of Fate, and his brother’s love for a woman deemed by the censorious Establishment to be unworthy of being Queen. She cast her glance down towards the tablecloth, momentarily afraid that her brash American scepticism about the mumbo-jumbo of reverence to a hereditary monarchy would mark her out as a pariah.

And so she was in a position to see what perhaps no-one else in the room could; the slight hesitation as Sir Oswald Mosley took up his glass, and the ritual formality with which he passed it over the cuff on which he had written before raising it to his lips to join in the echoing thunder that resounded through the Assembly Rooms.

“The King!”

The frost-bound garden behind the Assembly Rooms was stiff and formal; put up for the winter and not, quite clearly, intended for public display. Wigwams of bean-poles tied with baler twine hung suspended, laden with hoar frost over the herbaceous borders. The dark figure of her quarry was no more than ten yards ahead of her. 

Polly inhaled, drawing the sharp cold air laden with wood smoke deep into her nostrils, and felt more alive than she had done for months. And that was odd, too. For surely, she'd been in love all that time? And didn't all the magazines say that that the world was changed when that happened to you, and even the colours of the rainbow sounded brighter?  
So how wrong was it, for her to feel better to be on the case, with every nerve-ending tingling with excitement and the fear of discovery, than to be on Joe's arm at some glitzy event, arriving amid a shatter of flashbulbs and an echo of admiring sighs from the bystanders?

"Do you need a light?" she asked, her nonchalant tones pitched to surprise. And succeeding; he spun on the spot, the starched front of his shirt and its row of diamond studs gleaming stark and heartless in the frozen moonlight. She held out the little silver matchbox she had carried in her evening purse against this moment, before the immaculately dressed man could respond either to assent or demure. Before answering, he took a match from the box, struck it, and lit the cigarette between his lips. The flare of the match lit up the device emblazoned across the box's front. She thought she detected a hint of surprise; even, she hoped, admiration. He disguised it well, though.

"Miss Perkins. I hoped we might become better friends this evening. Perhaps meeting here, so - unexpectedly - may assist my hopes. Though I confess I - hadn't expected you to follow me when I wandered out here to think."

Polly gave a disbelieving shrug; she hoped it was visible in the reflected light from the Assembly Room windows. The protest of coincidence was for form's sake only; the hints about the time and place of this assignation which he had given had been too clear, earlier. The frosty air struck cold on her body under the thin satin of her gown. She was not unaware that, painful as this was proving, it might also have its advantages.

"You're an interesting man, Sir Oswald. And interesting men - interest me."

The moonlight fell full on his face; she saw him raise a sardonic eyebrow. "Oh? And why might that be?"

She put all she could into her voice, turning it into the huskiest of purrs. "Because, Sir Oswald, interesting men so often turn out to be dangerous men. Haven't you found that? And I _adore_ dangerous men."

He gestured; the glowing tip of his cigarette described a glow-worm pattern in the night air. "I can see, Miss Perkins, that you have experience -"

The pause was just short enough not to be a deadly insult.

"Of dangerous men," he concluded smoothly. He nodded towards her right hand, which still loosely held the silver matchbox. "Might it have been one of them who presented you with that pretty little thing?"

"Sir Oswald. You can't ask a girl to give up her secrets just for the asking. That would be so foolish. After all, I might even ask you to tell me one of your secrets in return."

He smiled; the moonlight glinted coldly off his teeth. In his sharp-boned face it gave him a suddenly vulpine air, and Polly's shiver was not just because of the chill surroundings.  
"Ask away. You'll never know what you might be given - until you ask for it."

She put her head on one side. Long experience had taught her that even those who certainly ought to know better could be disarmed by her adoption of a pose of girlish innocence. "What was that I saw you writing on your cuff, before the Loyal Toast?"

He hesitated a moment, but then flicked back his jacket sleeve, revealing the small symbol scribbled there; three parallel undulating lines, like a symbol on an Admiralty chart intended to indicate 'rough waters here'. She looked at him nonplussed, and his smile widened. He stretched out a finger and traced around the device embossed on the matchbox, allowing his finger to linger suggestively on the thistle in the eagle's talons.

"You need to research your Jacobite traditions. Did you notice the waiters removing the finger-bowls just before the Master started speaking? If Royalty had been present, no-one except the royal party would have had finger-bowls at all. Some traditions die very hard. And those of us who wish to uphold them - after our own fashion - have learned ingenuity."

She creased her forehead in thought, recalling the glass being passed over the hidden symbol on his wrist before his punctilious participation in the toast. And then she made her voice deliberately dismissive. "You mean it's a superstition?"

The baronet's smile broadened. "Hardly. And though I said it was a tradition, that's wrong too. Traditions look backwards; they're what strangle any hope of vitality at birth. This country - the whole of Europe, with one or two exceptions - is choking under the accumulation of its traditions. Even America - which two generations ago everyone applauded for its freedom from the outmoded shackles of the ages - is in danger of choking under the growth of tradition. And like everything you put in the soil there, they grow faster and bigger than anywhere else."

"You sound like my Uncle Oliver, clearing weeds out of his backyard."

The baronet, evidently not picking up on her mildly sardonic tone, nodded. "Weeds. Yes. They need to be rooted out. Without vigilance, they'll overrun the garden, and choke all the strong young growth -"

She made her tone bland, yet inviting. "Tell me. If you had the power, how would you rid us of those weeds?"

Sir Oswald looked at her; his glance was both direct and compelling. Despite herself she felt her pulse begin to beat quicker. This man had charisma, no two ways about it. And ability, also. And - she gulped - sex appeal. In spades. This close, it was impossible to ignore. It was not a quality with which she was unfamiliar. To date, though, she had always had a blithe assumption that no matter how far she took matters, 'No' would always be a complete answer. No matter what the calm assurance of the other player in the game that he would have his way, she had always unquestionably assumed the existence of the unseen umpire, to assure fair play. However close to the line she took matters. Nor had she assumed that those she might have tempted along the way - trapped by their delusions, never hers - would ever fail to play by the rules.

This man, she sensed, had no interest in rules, except as a cloak for his dominating ambition.

"Do you really want to know?"

She nodded, dumbly.

"Well, you came here as the guest of Charlie Cook, didn't you? A good man, from a good family: a family with a real stake in this country. Who's served, with distinction. Who's made sacrifices for the sake of something he believes in. And yet his vote in the nation's affairs counts for as much - or as little - as if he were some waster from a Gorbals' slum, who's never done a hand's turn in his life and waits every week to draw his dole so he can spend it all on cheap whisky and gaspers. Or a small shopkeeper from a provincial town, whose highest idea of sophistication is tinned peaches with evaporated milk, and who is so cowed by "what the neighbours might think" if he dares to stray from his narrow, conformist little rut that by now he's become incapable of allowing himself an original thought from one year's end to another." His mouth twisted up in a grimace. "And yet - because of the strangulation of "tradition" it wouldn't even occur to my old comrade-in-arms how degrading and just plain absurd that situation is. Or that he ought to be doing something to change it."

Polly widened her eyes. "And you would?"

His grin was now almost boyish. "Of course I would. What else could I do? Neither of our countries will get anywhere until we grow up enough to fling out the things we've clung to mindlessly for so long, like a boy steeling himself to throw away his teddy bear before he goes to his prep school. What we need is to have the courage to cast off the rule of the muddled masses, those who are too ill-educated to see what has to be done, and too short-sightedly selfish to make the sacrifices needed to achieve it even if they could see it."

She put a nicely gauged blend of admiration and scepticism into her tone. "You'd really want to overturn democracy? And replace it with what?"

Sir Oswald shrugged. "The rule of the best, of course. What else?"

"Aristocracy?" Her voice was disbelieving, dismissive. It nettled him, obviously. He cast a glance towards the Assembly Rooms, from which dance music was still drifting. 

"Well, not in the sense you mean it, no. In the world I'd create if I could, one couldn't simply be given the privileges of the best by accident of birth. Or buy your way there; though at least one thing where your country is head and shoulders above ours is not having this superstitious fear of new money. At least your country recognises that someone who proves his superiority by creating his own wealth is to be applauded, not quietly sneered at behind your hand." His voice was deep with passion. "Look at the young man you danced with earlier. Money and position; all the chance in the world to make a real mark - to serve by doing so and so prove himself worthy to rule. But instead - as he is - well, he makes himself a typical example of what everyone thinks of when you talk about aristocracy; a bone-headed, well-tailored young oaf without an idea in his head beyond jazz-clubs, chorus girls and chasing after foxes."

Briefly Polly wondered, with a hint of inner amusement, whether Lord Peter would change his opinion of his nephew if he were to hear Sir Oswald, whom he evidently disliked, echo it so eeriely. Well astride his hobby-horse, her companion continued on without waiting for her response.

"But then the so-called aesthetes among the young are worse. Long haired unhealthy velvet-jacketed pansies, revelling in their degenerate tastes and screaming shrilly after the next new thing, if it's only vile enough to tickle their jaded fancies. Sometimes I despair; I find myself thinking that the post-war generation's rotten to the core, and will drag us all to hell with them if people with the eyes to see don't pull together the courage to step out and stop it."

"We aren't all like that, my generation," Polly said, a little stung. 

He smiled disarmingly. "Indeed. Forgive me. There is gold among the present generation, if you're prepared to pan for it. But it's so cryingly difficult to convince the young of the need for service and sacrifice. Those concepts got too badly smeared by the mud of Flanders, and the mumbling red-faced idiots sitting safely behind the lines who mouthed them as platitudes without having the courage to look at what they meant by them. And then the Bolsheviks hijacked them for their own foul purposes. But you, of course, are lucky. You have indeed had experience of meeting - a different sort of man. I imagine your - ah - friends in the Flying Legion wouldn't find the notions I'm talking about as alien as most of your generation might do?"

Polly felt a thrill down her nerves. The moment had come; the one to which she had subtly been leading up to all along.

"You mean Joe?" she said with a deliberate carelessness. "I think he's apolitical. Well - I've never heard him talk about politics, anyway."

Sir Oswald leant over towards her. "Perhaps because he's never heard any politics worth talking about?"

She smiled. "That could be so. And I confess: if I tried to tell him what you'd tried to tell me tonight, I'd be making a pig's ear of it. Because, if you put it that way, Sir Oswald, I might have to confess that neither have I. But I'd be fascinated to have you enlighten me. Please feel free to tell me more about - politics."

He turned and offered her his arm. "I'm hosting a house-party over the next few days. There are one or two people I'd like you to meet, people who can talk better than I on the topic. And there are a couple of guests from the Continent - from places where they're trying a few experiments in - politics - we could profit from here. If your host can spare you, may I take the liberty of sending a car for you in the morning?"

Her heart raced; after all and despite the warnings it had almost been too easy. And then common sense prevailed: of course this part had been easy. Flies seldom find the spider's web hard to evade. It's backing out that proves the tricky part. She nodded, suddenly without words and abruptly aware of her own vulnerability.

"You look chilled to the bone, Miss Perkins. I'd better be taking you back to where you'll be warmer."

But even the warmth of hot coffee back in the Assembly Rooms, and (everything else being settled) eventually the comfort of her own bed with two stone hot-water bottles and one big rubber one, failed really to warm her, and when she at last slept her dreams were haunted by cold dark eyes, and infused with a pitiless chill.


	4. Joe receives some unexpected news and then finds himself in deadly danger

Joe pushed aside his plate and grinned across the breakfast table at Davies, who was still dismembering his bloater with the skill of a trained anatomist.

“Didn’t they feed you at sea?”

Davies snorted. “There was food enough; what I didn’t get was time to eat it. What with the three-day storm that blew up before we were six hours out of port, and all the smashed limbs and contusions that followed from that, and then a more extensive crop than normal of the usual shore-leave complaints - tell me, Sullivan, would it hurt your Yankee bootleggers to invest a few dollars of their bloated profits and get just one or two competent chemists on their staff? If the men didn’t most of them have the livers of rhinoceroses I’d have lost a couple on the way back. DTs go into an entirely different dimension when it’s wood alcohol fuelling them. I begin to suspect where that writer fellow - I forget the name - Lovecraft, was it? - got his ideas from. Anyway, I handed them all over to the base hospital when we docked yesterday, wrote up my case-notes and made my escape, leaving the Old Lady still working her way through piles of requisitions and exceptions, and swearing by every god or devil I’ve heard of as well as a few I hadn’t that if they surprise us with a full inventory check - which they did, last time we docked in Portland - that we’ll be able to present for inspection every last paper-clip their Lords of the Admiralty expect us to have, even if it takes outright highway robbery to make our stores up to complement. ”

He finished with the bloater, took up his coffee cup, and favoured Joe with a sharp, beady-eyed look. “Anyway, you’re lucky I’ve had any time to spend on your concerns at all. And what I have done, I’ve had to do by proxy. They found your suspect, you know. I got a wire confirming that, this morning. Went by the name of Silverman. Most recently, that is. By other names, earlier. Fingerprints, fortunately, are less easy to change than names.”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “He had a record?”

Davies nodded. “Started as a ragged-school kid, practically from the slums, but ingenious and good with his hands, apparently. Got a break - apprenticed to a locksmith in a good way of business - did well - and then got picked up by the police with a gang of jewel thieves. Presumably they found his talents useful. He got a light sentence - young man, first offence, over-persuaded by the leader of the gang (who seems to have been a plausible, charismatic rogue), every likelihood of his doing well at a legitimate career if he was given a second chance - his lawyer made a good job of it. And certainly it appeared he’d learned his lesson. At least -” Davies’ face twisted up in a grimace. “At least he’s never been caught since.”

Joe chose his words with care. “And - have the authorities managed to get hold of him now?”

For that was the danger point. Silverman might have valuable information about the plot, but once he started to talk - as he must, to save his skin - he could still ruin Dex.

Davies’ smile was grim. “In a manner of speaking. The City Morgue has him. Found dead on the tracks outside Grand Central Station two days ago. Official cause of death; suicide. Injuries not entirely consistent with said verdict. No record by any of the train drivers of a compatible incident. Yes. Well. Our friends don’t waste time or sympathy if they have a leak to plug.”

Joe inhaled sharply. “It seems it was a bright idea of Franky’s to get Dex out of the country and hide him as well as she did.”

Davies nodded. “Hm, yes. But equally: it was just as well he had the gumption to come straight to the Old Lady in the first place. As soon as you sent through that list of names I got my Bostonian pattern-matcher working on them. Apparently there’s been a string of suicides and strange accidents connected with some of them over recent years. Blackmail’s no novelty to them, it seems. And nor is eliminating anyone who shows signs of resisting. Anyway, what do you plan now?”

Joe tapped the telegram which the hotel waiter had brought in with the breakfast. FILLYS MAIDEN OUTING EXCEEDED EXPECTATIONS STOP STARTS TODAY LEICESTER STOP GREAT HOPES. He devoutly hoped that Charlie would never enlighten Polly about the nature of the code they had agreed to ensure he was kept posted about her progress. He rather thought that his jaw might not survive the revelation that they had for secrecy purposes chosen to refer to her as a novice racehorse in training.

“Look’s like Polly’s doing well at getting close to one of the suspects. She’d be better off without my interference. And I ought to bring Dex up to speed about what you’ve found out. We need to work out what to do about the Legion: how I can be sure we've cleaned out the traitors. I’ll be heading up to Glasgow as soon as they’ve refuelled and prepared my plane.”

Davies looked up at him, an unreadable expression under his hooded lids. Joe tried - apparently successfully - to stop himself flushing. There were perfectly valid reasons why he needed to confer with the Legion’s acknowledged engineering genius at this precise moment. There was certainly no reason for Davies to look so - inscrutable - about it all. And inscrutable was such a fundamentally insulting quality to project at him. After all, if Davies had only had the decency to come out with outright disapproval of Joe’s still regarding Dex as central to the fortunes of the Legion, given all that had passed, then there would have been things Joe could have done; things he could have said. Inscrutable, on the other hand, was just plain unfair. And disturbing. And, not coincidentally, calculated to provoke guilt.

He allowed himself a small, strictly private flash of humour. Davies - formidable intelligence agent as he was - was not actually telepathic. That being so, he could hardly be privy to what Joe had planned for what he had privately dubbed the "less formal" part of his urgent debriefing session with Dex.

The doctor picked up his cup and wandered over towards the window. "North," he said meditatively, looking out over the hotel garden to the blue-green expanse of the English Channel, where the little waves danced and glittered in the low autumn sunlight. "Right direction, anyway. This won't last, and there's fog behind it. Wind behind the fog, too, or I'm no judge. You'd best be going if you want to make the most of the good flying conditions.

Joe finished his own coffee in a swift couple of gulps. "Looks like Franky won’t get out from under the paperwork mountain until after I’ve gone. Give her my love.”

Davies smiled. “Of course. I’ll try to remember to mention it this evening.”

Joe’s face must have registered surprise, because he could see the echo of it reflected in the faintly mocking curve of Davies’s lips.

“Over dinner, you know. The Old Lady promised she’d find time to squeeze in a bite to eat however bad the paperwork got. I gather the food in this hotel is quite good, so I’ve booked us a table for eight pm.”

Joe became aware that a crack had appeared in the inscrutability of Davies’s expression; indeed, that under the sardonic surface there was a strange air of self-consciousness, tinged with both pride and embarrassment, but also with wariness. Abruptly, light dawned. He had, he supposed, something of a reputation in certain circles of being a dangerous man. And dangerous men, if their pride and jealousy had been aroused, were - reputedly - unsafe. It struck him that what Charlie had said about him a few days ago was right; he was better at picking them up than putting them down. At least in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Hilarity bubbled up inappropriately within him. He regretted that the situation was so complicated that he couldn’t share his amusement with Davies, whose qualities he had come to value, or indeed reveal to him exactly why his principal reaction to the news that Davies was going to dine tête-à-tête with Franky that evening was simple and sincere good wishes. Still tamping down his amusement, he said goodbye, paid his hotel bill and collected his scanty luggage. And the faintly unreal sense of hilarity continued as he collected the plane, checked her briskly over, filed his flight-plan with the control tower, and arrowed her into the air, setting in a straight course towards the Clyde, and all he knew awaited him there.

It might have been a timely nudge from his preternaturally overworked guardian angel. Or perhaps a sixth sense: it was rumoured in the Legion that Joe had an extra pair of eyes conveniently situated between his shoulder blades.

Or maybe it was nothing more than that the sun was low in the sky and his course put it directly behind him, and no pilot who had seen combat could be on anything other than on heightened alert when those conditions prevailed. 

For whatever reason, without conscious direction from Joe’s brain, his hands abruptly jinked the plane out of her direct course, and pushed her nose downwards towards the smooth turf of the Southern chalk uplands, losing a couple of hundred feet in height. As he levelled out at the lower altitude, he throttled back, hard, cutting his speed dramatically.

The pursuing aircraft, of whose existence he had not until then consciously been aware, shot forward into view above and to the left of him, as it launched its opening salvo into a patch of clear air that an instant before had been occupied by Joe’s plane. Joe flipped his plane round in a hard, tight curve and took her screaming back towards the south, towards the sea. This was not a battle he wanted to fight over populated country. Even in this rural district, church spires in the local honey-coloured stone poked up to indicate where villages nestled behind folds in the chalk hills, and the lichened slate roofs of remoter farmhouses and outbuildings littered the hillsides. Blazing wreckage falling out of a clear autumn sky could rip the heart out of those little hamlets, and bring horror to homes that seemed to have slept tranquilly under the shadow of the chalk escarpments since the Domesday surveyors passed that way.

The other pilot was good. Joe’s change of direction had non-plussed him for no more than a split second. He banked, turned, and came back in hectic pursuit. Joe took the Warhawk down as low as he dared, backing its enhanced manoeuvrability at low altitudes against the other’s formidable speed, weaving a fast, twisting course down the steep-sides wooded coombes which cut their way down through the chalk uplands towards the sea. His assailant matched his every move with grim precision, holding his nerve, waiting for the chance of engaging him with best advantage. 

The huge ragged-edged bite out of the English coastline that was Poole Harbour went past in an eye-blink below him. The turbulent, sandy-grey waters between Hengistbury Head and the Isle of Wight were, he knew, shallow; too shallow for what he had in mind.

There was another option; one he remembered from the sunlit years before Nanjing; when a laughing young RAF flier he’d bumped into in some jazz-club in Soho had dragged him half-protesting off through the dawn to the Hamble where he said his sister “the navy wallah” was spitting feathers and stamping her foot on the quayside at the defalcations of her intended crew for the Round the Island Race. And, defying fate, and common sense, and the imprecations of those who had chosen to sail deeper draught vessels, he and Franky and Charlie had opted to thread the Needles, taking the perilous inside passage between the chalk stacks that trailed from the Western edge of the Isle of Wight to save precious minutes.

Minutes, only, but enough to win their race.

Joe headedhard and fast straight at the white rocks, tall as five storey buildings, with the incoming tide foaming around their base. At the last possible split second before impact he flipped the plane through ninety degrees on its horizontal axis and took her sideways through the apparently impossible gap between the bulk of the island and the most landward of its trailing stacks. 

His opponent, as he had done since the chase began, copied the manoeuvre.

Just not quite accurately enough. The pursuing plane went up in a blinding fireball as the edge of a wing or some part of the fuselage brushed the unforgiving chalk.

Joe brought his plane back around the sweep of Alum Bay, the adrenaline still spiking through his system, checking the situation from a cautious distance. The broken wreckage of the crashed plane was sending up a thick plume of dark smoke from between the rocks. As he turned he heard the dull “crump” of a maroon going off in the distance. Someone had managed to alert the coastguard.

Which, he supposed, absolved him of any obligation to hang around to see if by some miracle the pilot had managed to struggle alive from the wreckage. Though somehow, he doubted a search would be successful. He turned his plane round again, and considered his next move. His attacker must have known what flight plan he had filed. There was no other reasonable explanation. And that, given he had been cleared from a Royal Naval base using the day’s codes from the Admiralty code book, was more worrying than he could say.

He had to warn Franky of just how close to the top the tendrils of this conspiracy must reach. It was hardly as if he could fly back to Portland. Nor was he - regrettable as that thought was - planning to continue his journey to Scotland. 

Davies had been right; the fog was now rolling in steadily in from seawards. It was encroaching fast upon the land, too: even St Catherine’s Point, seven miles to the south-east, was not as clear as it had been five minutes ago. As Joe peered into the up-channel murk, and gave the plane more altitude in a bid to rise above the rolling fog, that the wholly familiar outline of another Warhawk came powering down from the east towards him, homing in like an arrow and clearly hell-bent on combat.

Not just any Warhawk, either; as they manoeuvred around each other in the gathering gloom, trying to gain positional advantage, firing ranging salvos the hairs rose on the back of Joe’s neck. For it was a tailored death which he faced, one planned and crafted with him alone in mind.

Every marking on the enemy plane mirrored his own; even down to the call-sign and the victory insignia.

Had he been a superstious man (and at bottom most fliers were, as the late night yarn-swapping of dire predictions and deathly jinxes in countless messes over the years amply demonstrated) this duel in the eerie quiet above the fog-bound, unseen sea could have been lost in the first second of the other plane’s appearance. It was not as if, growing up as he had in a predominantly Irish neighbourhood of West London, that he had never heard the legend of the fetch, the dark familiar who appears in the likeness of a doomed man in the hours or minutes before his death.

A man of a different stamp would have gone into that combat knowing himself to be already fated to lose it.

Joe, however, was swept forward on a lava-flow of white-hot rage, which cleared rather than fogged his brain, and lent a deadly, surgical precision to the aim of his weapons. There was not even the shadow of a question in his mind about it. He would emerge the victor, come what may. For, knowing what he knew about the Celtic traditions which had shaped them both, he knew whose hand had reached out from beyond the grave to steal a part of his own being, almost a part of his own soul and turn it into the engine of his destruction. Though he had been unable to take his vengeance on Grogan in person for his treachery, he would take it in full measure on his substitute, the shadowy figure in the cockpit of the other Warhawk.

They twisted and turned around each other in a maelstrom of flying bullets, lines of fire carving their way across the dull skies. The tendrils of the fog crept up around them as they battled. The dogfight spilled across the shrouded Channel, and the bark of Joe’s weapons was answered in the same vicious coinage from his assailant. But it was, after all, only a matter of time. Joe had found within himself a reserve of bone-deep anger, and he had been flying this plane for so long he knew her capabilities to the nearest fraction. He called up her best speed - felt her answer to his gentling hand - turned, snarling, and gave the usurper everything he could dredge up from within himself.

The other plane faltered - broke - and tumbled in flaming fragments through the curtain of the fog which spread beneath them.

Without pausing, Joe turned the crate round and headed North, as though instinct had caught his hands and his feet, and seized the compass for him, to boot. He had gone a scant few hundred yards before he became aware of the nauseously unctuous smell permeating the cockpit. A quick glance and a brief check of instruments confirmed his worst fears; one of his opponent’s rounds must have punctured his fuel system and raw fuel must be dripping perilously close to the super-heated metal of the engine. And if that happened -

Briefly he considered ditching, but one glance at the thick white fog below him ruled that out. The ships down in that murk - and they were some of the busiest waters in the world below - would be hard pressed to see and avoid each other. A lone castaway would stand little or no chance of being spotted and picked up. More of being run down, his cries lost in the murk.

There was only one thing he could do, desperately risky as it was, and slender as were his chances of success.

Joe cut his fuel supply, and set the Warhawk into an unpowered, shallow glide towards the remote dark brush-stroke that was the coast of England, beyond the lapping white waves of the encroaching fog.


	5. Dex receives some bad news, delivered in person by an unexpected messenger

Dex tried to stifle a yawn. The smoky room was hot, and stuffy, and the huge Sunday lunch he had just eaten was making him dull and sleepy. Also, he had not slept well. He had bad dreams - in the only one he could remember Polly had held out an issue of the _Chronicle_ to him, folded open to show the announcement of her engagement to Joe, and when he had protested she’d smiled a sly, serpentine smile, and said, "Why, Dex! It must be true: it’s in the papers”. Furthermore, Catriona MacMillan’s idea of a comfortable bed might, perhaps, have been accepted as such by a medieval monk accustomed to scourgings and the mortification of the flesh for the better purification of the soul. For anyone else, it was unduly hard, lumpy, and the blankets were thin and scratchy. 

Although no-one could have accused Dex of being sybaritic in his tastes, one of the hardest things he had found since arriving in Scotland had been the niggling, day-to-day discomforts. And, paradoxically, as his own personal worries had subsided his consciousness had increased of the grim monotony of the environment he had found himself in, and the erosion of the human spirit to which life in such a place without hope of anything better often led.

Dex had no difficulty in understanding how such an environment might have produced a Geordie McGeown: it was a source of continuing amazement to him how the same barren soil had produced so many different and much finer individuals.

Such as those in the room at present.

Since his return from the bothy, and his decision to take McAllister into his confidence about the shadowy conspiracy whose tendrils he could feel stirring and tightening around them as each day passed, McAllister had taken the opportunity to introduce him to a wide selection of people whom McAllister believed might have a role to play when the crunch came, and who needed to be - oh so carefully - identified and sounded out. 

The current gathering was a good example; another of the odd little clubs to which McAllister mysteriously had the entrée. They were, as MacAllister had taken care to warn him, a bunch of odd ducks; eccentric, often wildly visionary, tramping in step with a drummer no-one else was able to hear. But Dex realised that they had a passion, and drive to look into the condition of their fellow men and not rest until that condition had been improved. Further, they would turn with the wrath of the True Believers driving out false prophets on anyone who was peddling cant about alleviating human misery as a mere cloak for their lust for power.

McAllister signalled him over. There was a thin, eager-faced young man, his neck swathed in a woolly muffler, who had been gesticulating excitably besides him.

“Robin here has an unco’ story to tell,” he observed. “It seems like there’s been someone stirring matters in the dockyard towns. His speaking takes him up and down the land, ye ken, and without doubt there’s always a lot of blethering to be heard. Specially when times are bad. But - I’ll let you tell him yourself, Robin.”

Robin needed no second prompting. “It’s like they’ve all run mad. Instead of looking to how they need to help themselves, it’s as if they’re pinning all their hopes on some saviour coming from outside; like King Arthur or Bonnie Prince Charlie or Richard the Lionheart, riding in from nowhere and sweeping all the bad government away before him and creating an earthly paradise in the blink of an eye. Bairns’ stories! Arrant nonsense, and lazy-minded with it, but they can no’ see it for themselves. But I’ve no doot there’s something at the back of it.” 

Dex’s mind turned to the little match-box Polly had held out in the bothy; the eagle with the thistle in its claws, spreading its wing across the globe. A bunch of rich men playing with Jacobite insignia to add a little glamour to their lives, or a cloak for a power play on an unprecedented scale? How much of that dare he even hint at?

“I think -” he began, and then there was an interruption.

A small, excitable, ragged child burst into the room calling out, “Meester McAllister! There’s a lassie here - she’s urgent need to speak to Yankee Mike, and would have me bring her here -”

Dex turned, expecting to see Helen Adamson. Joe had found time to drop her a line introducing Dex, and her honesty and intelligence, to say nothing of her family connections, had made bringing her in on the plot self-evidently the right thing to do. She had made a number of useful connections already.

Franky was outlined in the doorway. Dex’s stomach lurched. She was in full uniform, which was a warning in itself, but the grim set of her lips would have alerted him as to her errand even had she been in mufti. Her good eye locked on his face. She gave a curt jerk of her head, indicating he should join her outside. He turned to stammer some sort of excuse to McAllister, to find the older man making quick, shooing motions.

“Get away with ye. Maybe it’s come, what we spoke of. Let me know what comes of it, but don’t fret. If you’re needed more elsewhere, we’ll manage in the shop somehow.”

Dex found himself abruptly outside, trying not to trot undignifiedly to keep up with Franky’s long stride as she steered him determinedly towards the long low car parked against the kerb. It was not until they were powering along the fastest route westwards, out of the City, that either of them spoke.

“Is it -” Dex swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. “Is it Joe?”

Franky gave a sharp, angry nod. “His plane’s overdue. Badly.”

“How late -?”

She interrupted him. “There’s more. A trawler got its nets tangled up around a chunk of wreckage. They brought it in for inspection. I’ve not seen it myself - when I left Simon was still angling to make sure he got his paws on it, against the RAF and Coastguard - but I gather there was part of a call-sign visible on it. And Dex - I’m sorry, but it tallied.”

She turned the car off the main road, heading towards Helensburgh.

Dex’s mind whirled. “Could he have ditched?”

It was clutching at straws, of course, whistling in the dark. A stricken pilot seldom had a chance to make good his escape from a crashing plane, and both of them knew it. Nevertheless - 

Franky nodded. “I got a couple of planes up and quartering the area as soon as the fog lifted. Two of my best reconnaissance spotters. They’ll find him if anyone can.”

Her voice was imbued with a determined optimism, but Dex had caught the one word which gave her confidence the lie.

Fog. 

If Joe had ditched over water, in fog - then the chances of his being recovered alive before he drowned or hypothermia took him must be very, very small indeed.Even assuming he’d managed to ditch successfully in the first place.

Dex turned, resting his head against the passenger-side window, trying to recall every single second of those minutes in the bothy, in the store at the drome. If his fears were fulfilled he would have to live on those memories for a very, very long time.

Franky left him to himself. When he turned his head forward again she was taking the car fast down a long, tree-lined drive at the far end of which Dex could dimly glimpse a big, grey collonaded mansion. She turned off before they reached the house, swinging the car round the curve of an ornamental lake, and down towards a flat broad swathe of grass, which stretched out into the far distance. There were a couple of single seater planes drawn up at the side of it, and, a little way away, an arrogant black warbird twice their size, looking like a peregrine falcon mewed up in a domestic pigeon coop.

Dex gulped. He gestured vaguely towards the shrouded bulk of the house, on the far side of the lake.“Who - ?”

Franky shrugged. “It belongs to sort of cousins of mine. But they aren’t here at the moment. They’ve never minded me using the airstrip, and I didn’t want to go through official channels. In the circumstances.” She climbed onto the wing and flipped up the canopy. “Get in. And I hope you’re wearing your knitted silk long johns, because there’s a hell of a storm brewing. I had the wind in my teeth the whole way up.”

Dully, Dex scrambled in behind her. One gloved hand reached out with a sure touch to the controls. The propeller swung, whirred to life, and they lurched bumpily down the grass strip until the plane made the leap into her proper element, and they soared.

They came down from the North on the wings of the storm, Franky riding the turbulence like a Valkryie. They set down with finicky precision on the Albion’s flight deck.  
There were people clustering about her as Franky scrambled out of the cockpit, but she waved them impatiently away. Dex trotted after her, down into the bowels of the ship. She swung open a heavy steel door, and beckoned him in after her. 

The space inside had the air of having been hastily cleared; a weapons storage area, Dex guessed. The chunk of wrecked plane - he gulped - was in the centre of it, under the harsh white glare of some hastily rigged spotlights. A slight, dark-haired man was bent over it: he straightened as Franky and Dex entered. 

“Simon. You got it, then.”

The dark man nodded, unsmiling. “And this must be Mr Dearborn.” He extended a hand. “The name’s Davies. I’m hoping you may be able to shed some light on this lot. Tell me what tools you need, and I’ll arrange to have them sent down.”

Dex nodded. He couldn’t have spoken, his throat was too choked. Davies’s apparent callousness was too much.

Franky wandered over, and put a hand on Davies’s arm. “Simon. Ease up. What’s happened?”

The small man’s reptilian eyes blinked, coldly, in the glare. "That is what’s puzzling me.”He stabbed a finger accusingly down at the wrecked fuselage.“You see, we have a Boy Scout. Up near the coastguard station, on the cliffs above the Needles, on the Solent side. Out with his father’s borrowed Zeisses, and trying to score points for his Birdspotter’s badge, I gather.” He turned to fix Dex with an intense gaze. “And being a fourteen-year old boy, and a Boy Scout, and having the benefit of field glasses, I think we can assume his aircraft observations are reliable.”

Dex passed his tongue over his dry lips. “And he saw?”  
The small reptilian man hesitated before answering.

“And he saw?” Dex had not thought his voice could sound so uncompromisingly demanding as he repeated the question. The dark man blinked, and looked up at him, meeting his eyes full on for the first time.

“He saw? Now that is something of a mystery. What he says he saw is as follows. He says he saw two planes come out of the West. Over from Poole way. One hard on the heels of the other.”

“And?” Dex wasn’t giving any ground here. He stood four-square; perhaps a little absurdly, it occurred to him, but nevertheless he had no intention of budging. Davies, it seemed, recognised that, too. He nodded, briefly, in acknowledgement.

“Well. Yes. The leading plane was the Warhawk. They’ve recently been featured on the Woodbine’s cards, and our observer had no difficulty in recognising the profile. But, to be fair, he didn’t have any problem recognising the plane on his tail, either. Which was one of the new Avro fighters.”

Dex gave a quick, indrawn breath. Avro had aggressively poached some of the best designers over the last few years, and their designs now were good; very good. He had - half jokingly, and, given the response, unrepeatably - suggested to Joe that perhaps they might be the next place to look at, to replace the Warhawk.

“And?” 

Davies nodded his head. “Yes. Our observer didn’t hear any gunfire, but - well. Yes. Anyway, according to the Boy Scout the Warhawk flipped itself on its beam-ends - threaded the Needles - the Avro tried to follow - and missed. Caught itself between the cliffs, and blew up.”

There was a brief inhalation of breath from Franky.“Yes - I see -”

Dex might as well have been hearing a foreign language. Maybe he was. “What -?”

Franky was quick on the uptake. She always had been. “Joe took his crate through a gap between two narrow rocks. His pursuer died following him. Without firing a shot, apparently. So: what brought about that wreckage, then?”

Grasping unseen hands clutched close against Dex’s thorax, choking the breath out of his body. His brain and lungs were disassociated. He gulped, pawed, reaching up feebly. “Joe came through the gap?”

Davies nodded. “At least as far as Alum Bay. And without a bullet in him. At least, so far as we can tell.”

He was suddenly precise; scientific. But Dex was a scientist too, and they spoke the same language. “How can you tell? Demonstrate it? Repeatably?”

Davies looked at him, and shrugged. “I can’t. But I hope, with your knowledge of Joe’s plane, you might be able to assist me. Starting with this.”

His fingers had been curled over something concealed in the palm of his hand. Now he opened his hand, holding the little piece of distorted metal out to Dex.

“You see,” he added conversationally, “I’ve had the backroom boys pulling techspecs ever since I dug it out of the fuselage. And I sent off some boys in a fast launch to take a look at that Avro, and I can tell you this bullet didn’t come from his guns, whatever. So: have you any suggestions?”

Dex looked at it, looked again, and gulped.

“You recognise it?” Davies’s voice was sharp. Dex nodded. Davies exhaled.

“Tell me.”

Dex shrugged. “It’s a custom alloy. We - I - um - it’s supposed to deliver a faster rate of fire with less risk of firing jams. All the tests on the ranges bear that out. But it hasn’t been tried in actual combat -” His voice trailed off as his shock-dulled brain suddenly caught and made a connection. He whirled round to look Davies straight in the eye.

“Where did you say you found it?”

Davies smiled, and jerked his thumb at the hunk of fuselage, just below the raggedly broken edge which cut short the black painted call-sign. “Just about - yes - there.”

Franky looked at the fuselage, and whistled. Davies’s smile got more saturnine.

“Which poses quite a conundrum, doesn’t it? Shooting oneself in the side of one’s cockpit with one’s own guns would require - to put it mildly - no common degree of technical ingenuity. And an equally uncommon level of sheer stupidity.”

Franky leant back against the chunk of wreckage, crossing her booted feet at the ankle, and pulled a cigarette case from inside her uniform jacket, offering it to both Davies and Dex, both of whom declined, and then lighting a Sobranie for herself. “I’ve had middies inflicted on me who almost qualified on both counts,” she observed. 

Davies grinned at her. “Indeed. But having met Sullivan, while I’ll concede him the technical ingenuity - almost - I’d certainly say he came nowhere near qualifying on the second count.”

Dex looked up. “Get me the full technical specs on the Warhawk. And a decent tool-kit, not that kid’s toy one you’ve got there. I’m taking this heap of metal apart. I’m going to find out exactly what this mess is, and where it came from.”

Davies’s face registered shock - belatedly it occurred to Dex that ordering a brace of Royal Navy officers about between the decks of their own vessel was hardly the most tactful thing he could have done. Franky, however, merely grinned: out of the corner of his eye he spotted her wandering to the cabin door and barking orders to some minion out in the corridor, out of his line of sight. But it barely registered; the complexities of the problem and what it needed from him were already fully engaging the surface of his brain, and beneath that surface a distracting hope whose very existence he dared not even acknowledge bubbled away. He slipped a sliver of gum between his lips, and reached for the smallest of the spanners.

There was no night or day in the airless cabin, only the pitiless unchanging glare of the spotlights. Dex worked on, cocooned in a bubble of intense concentration. From time to time someone thrust mugs of coffee into his hand, and once soup and a hunk of bread. But still he worked on; drawing conclusions, breaking a code, piecing together piece by infinitesimal piece what must have happened yesterday over the fog-shrouded sea.

Eventually he drew breath and looked up, trying to subdue a tremor in hands that had barely put down his tools except for snatched seconds during the last eight or ten hours.  
Davies was looking intently across at him, from a perch on a stool he had occupied much of the night except for a few hours when, Dex presumed, his official duties had taken him elsewhere. 

The door swung quietly open; Franky, alerted by who-knew-what telepathy was here; her uniform crisply pressed, no sign of fatigue allowed to sully her official, authoritative carapace.

He looked at them both, and began, without preamble. “Whoever’s plane that was, it wasn’t Joe’s. I’ve found five or six more bullets embedded in the fuselage in a grouping that covers less than the span of a palm print, and if they aren’t from Cap’s armament then I’ll undertake to eat them. Next, there’s this.” He picked up a six inch section of fuel line and waved it. “There ought to have been fireproofed lagging all alone that line; it’s a mod I installed myself, to reduce the fire hazards if the line itself gets severed. Not a trace. And finally -” He reached out for another bit of metalwork he had cut with infinite care out of the wrecked fuselage, and stabbed his finger down once, accusingly. “I certainly didn’t tighten this union joint. And if I thought anyone on my team might have done, I’d shoot them first and me after.”

Davies leant back, accepting, this time, the cigarette Franky offered him. “So. We have a mysterious third plane on the scene. Uncannily designed to duplicate Sullivan’s own crate. Suggesting - it would appear - that the other pilot was intending to bring something off which he was planning to stick your Legion with the blame for. The question is; who shot him down?”

“Joe,” Dex said definitively. 

Davies looked speculatively him for a moment, and then nodded. “Most likely. But in that case, where is he?”

Dex paused, suddenly stricken. The last few hours had occupied his mind so effectively and his triumph as it became increasingly apparent that he was not working on Joe’s plane so comprehensive that he had succeeded in overlooking the one key point in the whole matter.

Joe. Overdue. Badly. No contact.

He opened his mouth to say something - and before he could do so there came a tentative knock at the door. Franky opened it.

“This came through to the signals room, ma’am,” someone said from outside, and slid a thin piece of paper through to her. She looked at it, and whistled. And then laughed out loud. 

Davies turned to face her.

“What?”

“Telegram. Signed by my big brother. Apparently some horse has thrown him off and then stamped on him.” Her dark eyes were dancing; she couldn’t have looked more excited if she’d just been given a diamond bracelet. Or the opportunity to test fly a faster-than-sound plane. Dex thought Davies’s expression looked almost as helplessly bewildered as he felt.

She registered both of their expressions, and her own became even more recklessly hilarious. “Except, of course, that this telegram summoning me to attend on his bed of pain - if I can get leave, of course, which he confidently assumes I can and will - happens to be addressed to ‘Franks’.” She dropped it to the deck, paced five reckless paces, turned and gestured eloquently. “Piffle! My ever-loving brother hasn’t addressed either of his sisters by any variant of her given name since Edward VII ascended the throne. If he’d really been worried about his health and wanted to have me there he’d have called me what he always does.”

She turned, opened the door and shouted out into the corridor, “Get my launch ready.” She turned back. "Simon - if I can't get the time through channels you'll write me a chitty for a couple of days sick, won't you?"

Davies reached out and caught her arm; his face was steady and serious. “Look; the Admirality code book is compromised. The base is missing a signal lieutenant; he went off watch shortly after clearing Sullivan's flight plan, and he's been AWOL ever since. We’ve had Sullivan - possibly - shot down by someone who knew enough about his Warhawk to disguise another bird sufficiently well that it took his own engineer eight hours to tell the difference. Ought you really to be going dashing off to the bedside of someone just because he claims to be your brother, when he doesn’t even know your family nickname?”

Franky turned to face him, the light suddenly doused in her face.

“That’s a thought.” She turned out to the corridor and barked, “Get me a trunk call to Leicestershire, linked through the WT, pronto.” She turned back. “I’ll call Rhys. If there’s anything wrong I’ll know from him. Still: Dex, I know you’ve been up all night. But - assuming things are OK - would you mind being my driver?”

He gaped; she gestured impatiently. “You see; my brother never called me ‘Franks’ in his whole life. Neither did anyone else I could ever think of. Except one.”

The look in her eyes suddenly told Dex what her cryptic words could not, and he caught at the edge of the wreckage to keep him upright under the wave of relief and exhilaration which threatened to overwhelm him.

Out of the roaring of blood in his ears he made himself intelligible. “Sure, Franky. I’d be honored to.”


	6. Dex drives Franky to her brother's house in Leicestershire

Franky caught at the bell pull, and gave it everything she had: Dex almost expected to see it come away in her hand. Scarcely before the last echoes of the pealing had died away, the door fell open, and a formidably starched housekeeper was revealed. Her face broke into a broad grin on spotting Franky.

“Miss Francesca! Oh, thank goodness you’ve come! The master’s been fretting so - it’s been all we could do to make sure he stayed under doctor’s orders, and wasn’t roaming all over the house, doing a mischief to himself. Now, what can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Soup? If I don’t mind my saying so, Miss Francesca, you’re looking peaked; I’m sure I don’t know what they feed you in that Navy of yours. The master, he ordered dinner for seven thirty, but I could bring it forwards if you wanted -“

With a brisk swing of her shoulders Franky doffed her uniform great-coat, and handed it off to the housekeeper. She pulled off her black leather gloves and dropped them onto the hall chair. “Nothing, thanks, Cattsy. Not until after I’ve seen Pongo. And where is he?”

The housekeeper sighed in a resigned sort of way. “In his room, Miss Francesca. And a terrible job we’ve had keeping him there, for all this is the first day he’s been allowed out of bed. But -”

Her final words were lost on the wind, as Franky, her booted legs taking the stairs two at a time, was already off up to the upper reaches of the house. Dex, faintly bewildered, belatedly realised that the housekeeper was waiting, holding out her hand for his own coat. Fumbling with cold hands at the buttons he shed it, and was in the process of handing it to her when Franky’s head appeared over the balustrade from an upper landing.

“Dex! What on earth are you dawdling for, man? Come on up. Third door on the left.”

The housekeeper looked at him, with the air of one who seeks to make an unsuitable tool carry out a delicate but necessary job. “If you could, sir, I’d be obliged if you could see what you can do to keep Miss Francesca from tiring the master too much. She doesn’t realise, sir, how much these last few years have taken it out of him, and of course, he’ll not show it in front of her.”

Dex shrugged, helplessly. “I’ll try but - you know - Franky -“

The housekeeper’s face softened. “I do, sir. Known her since she was three years old, bless her. Might as well try and stop the wind as stop her once she gets an idea in her head. Anyway, I’ll not be keeping you, sir.”

The curved elegance of the double-staircase might as well have been Everest. Hope and terror warred within Dex as he ascended to the upper stories of the house. If Franky had been wrong -

The bedroom door was shut, but there was a brief hum of conversation from within it. He pushed it gently open to see a framed tableau of three figures: Franky, leaning easily against the wall and two men sitting in the alcove formed by the big bay window, a half-finished chess game on an inlaid wood table between them. The thin-faced, dark-haired man wearing baggy flannels and an open-necked shirt under a blue cable-knit sweater could only be Franky’s brother, the resemblance was so striking. And across from him, in pyjamas and dressing-gown was Joe; his face a mass of bruises and scratches, but his eyes suddenly lighting with a shock of pleasure as he caught sight of Dex, framed in the doorway and having surreptitiously to catch at the edge of the doorframe to hold himself up, his knees having suddenly gone so weak.

Words burst unstoppably out. “Joe! What in hell happened to you?”

Franky and her brother exchanged a quick glance, and Franky moved over to close the door behind them before anyone spoke again.

Joe’s voice was deadpan, but there was still that wicked gleam in his dancing eyes. “For official purposes, I died.”

_And almost for every other purpose, it looks like, too._

Dex kept his thought out of his face as best he might, but there was a sudden intensity about Joe’s expression which suggested he might not have been wholly successful.

Franky’s brother rose, limped over to Dex and extended a hand. “Charles Cook. So you must be the engineering wizard I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Taken aback - what could Joe possibly have been saying? - Dex mumbled something incoherent. Cook made an expansive gesture towards a wad of papers, bundled onto the window-sill, presumably to make room on the table for the chess set.

“There are a few designs me and a young cousin of mine have been playing about with - we could benefit from your expert views, if you could spare a moment -“

“Pongo!” Franky interrupted. “Do have some consideration. Dex has been on the go for the last thirty hours solid, last time I reckoned it up. You might have the decency to offer the poor guy a drink and a chance to sit down before you start trying to pick his brains.”

Charlie Cook looked somewhat shame-faced. “Sorry, old chap. Hadn’t thought. There’s decanters and a siphon on that sideboard, Piglet, if you don’t mind doing the honours.”

“So,” Joe said, since it was plain from Franky’s expression that any commentary by either of them on her nickname would not be entirely healthy, “what have you been up to?”

“In Dex’s case,” Franky said briskly, as she busied herself with glasses, “taking a lump of crashed Warhawk apart molecule by molecule to find out if by any chance there were any bits of you tangled up in it.”

Joe’s face darkened. He half turned towards Dex, his voice suddenly with a slightly lost note in it. “I - ah - oh. Yes. That was a complication I hadn’t banked on. You found my evil twin, then, I take it.”

“Well, bits of him,” Franky said, raising the whisky decanter. “Say when, Dex. Dredged up by a trawler somewhere south of Portland Bill. And as we hadn’t heard anything from you since you’d left we’ve spent the best part of the last two days trying to decide whether you’d prefer white lilies or just a nice bunch of bindweed at the funeral.”

Joe, momentarily, looked disconcerted. “I’m sorry. But given by that stage it was obvious that base must be leaking like a sieve, I could hardly get in touch with you, Franks. And the same goes for you, Dex. I did risk an anonymous wire with a Kipling quote to McAllister, but I suppose you must have left Glasgow by the time he’d puzzled it out.”

Dex gave him a tight nod, not risking his voice. Franky shot him a quick glance, and passed Dex a tumbler with three fingers of liquor in it. More to cover his confusion than anything else, he took a hefty swallow and then suppressed a sudden fit of spluttering. The whisky was all-but neat; evidently Franky thought he was in sore need of a stiffener. As it made its way down into his stomach and its warmth started to relax the tension that had gripped him for the last two days he could hardly say she was wrong, either.

“So,” Franky said, once drinks had been distributed, “give, Joe. What happened?”

Joe succintly recounted the ambush by the two strange fighters - they had, it seemed, managed to deduce most of that part pretty accurately for themselves - his realisation that his fuel line was leaking, and his long unpowered glide towards land, and safety. “Well,” he concluded, "as you’ve probably worked out, it wasn’t exactly a text book landing.”

“Oh, Joe! How badly did you mess up the kite?” Dex’s voice in enquiring about the plane, he realised a second or so too late, contained all the distress he had conscientiously held back in the face of Joe’s all too evident injury. But these three were, thank God, fliers. For them, planes were people, and being concerned for their welfare was an ordinary human response.

Joe grimaced. “Um. Well. She’s still got both her wings, and that’s something. You can take a look at her tomorrow; she’s stabled in a hangar half-way between here and Oxford. Anyway, I’ll get on to that bit in a moment. As I said, I got down on a patch of downland on the top of the cliffs somehow or other - and there were one hell of a lot of gorse-bushes when I jumped out, I can tell you. Of course, the fog was getting pretty thick by then, too. Fortunately, I’d taken a rough bearing on the nearest church spire as I was heading in towards the coast, and it was a pretty godforsaken bit of territory I’d managed to land on, so once I was sure the fog was thick enough to screen the kite I took the hand-held compass, and headed off down to the nearest village. It was fairly rough walking for the first three-quarters of an hour or so, and I fell in a couple of ditches and so forth, but eventually I hit a road of sorts, and about half an hour later I made it in to the village. Well, thank all the stars I managed to get to the local hostelry before afternoon closing time, and pitched the landlord a yarn about car trouble up on the downs. I managed to get a meal while I was waiting for the trunk call I’d booked, and then got on to Charlie who told me to get back to the kite, and he’d send someone along to bale me out. So I made my way back to the plane, by guess and by God, and settled down to sit out the wait.”

Joe’s attitude was nonchalant and his tone light, but Dex caught beneath it all the worries there must have been, sitting by the grounded plane in the gathering dusk, unable to tell whether the next passer-by would be friend or foe.

“Anyway, after an hour or two I heard the sound of a motor - sound travels a heck of a way in fog, and I hadn’t had anything else to listen to, barring the odd sheep, for a good while. Also, since as I said, the downland was pretty rough terrain whoever was driving wasn’t having the easiest time getting the bus along, and if they were trying to be quiet about it they weren’t managing it. So, not being entirely sure that whoever it was had my best interests at heart, I baled out of the cockpit, where I’d been sitting to keep warm, and took cover behind some sort of sheep pen or something of that sort, to see what transpired.”

Joe took a sip of his drink. “Well, the car or whatever it was came to a stop, and I could hear someone start casting around through the gorse bushes, clearly looking for something. And naturally pretty soon they stumbled across the kite. At which point the oddest thing happened.”

Dex leaned forwards. “What?”

“The other guy started whistling. Not just any old tune, either. It was something I’d last heard in a Paris nightclub the best part of five years ago. And bearing in mind who’d been part of the crowd last time I heard it, given that he was more than a little sweet on the chanteuse concerned -”

Franky’s brother grinned, broadly. “Not the only one, as I recall. Though fortunately for our bank balances, we were both outbid by a french vicomte with two chateaux and a string of racehorses. They tell me she’s the French ambassadress to Washington these days. Brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase ‘diplomatic relations’.”

Joe coughed, pointedly. “Anyway, I reckoned it was a fairly safe bet that this was my lift home arriving. So I bobbed up to make myself known, and was no end surprised to find this college kid I didn’t know from Adam -“

“Young Paul Shuttleworth,” Charlie said explanatorily to his sister. “I gathered via an indirect route that he wasn’t finding a complete outlet for his talents at Oxford, so I thought he’d jump at a chance to let off steam in a good cause.”

Joe ignored the interruption.“Anyway, even better, the vehicle I’d heard earlier turned out to be a tradesman’s van he’d commandeered from somewhere, stuffed to the gunwales with every tool and spare you could care to mention, and a brace of hefty mechanics to boot. So, with the help of all three of them - useful sort of lad with a spanner, your cousin: wasted on Oxford, in my opinion -”

“And his,” Charlie said. “Unfortunately, Uncle Henry has set his heart on having an Oxford MA to succeed him as chairman of the Board when they finally drag him off it, and young Paul isn’t going to risk getting cut off without a shilling, so he’s just having to grin and bear it.”

“As you so conspicuously didn’t,” Franky observed. Charlie shrugged.

“That was different. I had a war as an excuse for getting me out of Magdalen. Paul doesn’t.”

“He easily might have, if we aren’t careful,” Joe said grimly. “These guys we’re up against aren’t lacking in money or clout. And they’re playing for keeps. You aren’t telling me the secret Admiralty signals book is the sort of thing you can pick up in the nearest five and dime. Anyway, to cut a long story short, after a lot of hard work and some truly sensational cannibalising of spares - oh, don’t look at me like that, Dex; it had to be done and you’ll get your chance to put it right - anyway, we managed to bypass the damaged section of fuel line, and then all four of us somehow contrived to pull the bird out of the patch of gorse bushes where she’d been nesting, and manhandle her onto a flattish patch, and as soon as it was light enough and the fog had cleared a bit I took off, and nursed her along to a private airfield young Shuttleworth had given me the directions to - and very nicely set up it all was, too: tell me, if you can bear discussing anything so vulgar, Charlie, just how much money does that family have?”

“Lots and lots and lots,” Franky said, briskly wielding the soda siphon as she refreshed her glass. “When father decided to follow the flag instead of going into the family firm his father sold his shares at par to his business partner, and then when the War came Shuttleworths never looked back. Hence the poverty to which you find us reduced.”

She gestured expansively but hardly convincingly around the large, high-ceilinged room, with its ugly but opulent-looking mahogany furniture.

Joe snorted. “Anyway, young Shuttleworth had had to push off in the van back to Oxford, I gather to make a rendezvous with his tutor at nine ack emma, to which he was conspicuously not looking forward, and it’s to be hoped that his tutor didn’t bother to enquire what he was doing reeking of aviation fuel and engine oil at that hour in the morning -“

“If he’s who I think he is, he’s one of the most noxious pipe smokers in Oxford, so I hope for everyone’s sake Paul got a chance to wash off the inflammables before he went anywhere near him or that’ll be another Oxford college he’ll have on what passes for his conscience,” Charlie muttered.

This remark, being incomprehensible to all of them, passed without comment. Joe waved a hand, airily.

“Anyway, much to my relief, given that my various scrapes and bruises were definitely insisting on making themselves felt by then, Charlie had sent a car and a driver round to collect me, and had a doctor on hand when I got back, and made sure practically no-one got to see me and even fewer spot who I was - his housekeeper has been acting her socks off for the benefit of all and sundry, she really should go on the halls - while he put about this story that he was confined to bed after a riding accident, in case the presence of the doctor caused comment, you know.”

Having finished his story, he took a long pull at his drink, and sat back, looking faintly exhausted. There were drawn lines of pain about his mouth, and Dex was fairly sure that his injuries extended substantially beyond the “scrapes and bruises” he had airily dismissed them as. It wasn’t just Joe’s kite that he itched to get his fingers on - purely to ascertain the full extent of the damage, naturally.

“So,” Charlie said, “we decided it was much more sensible all round if we let the bad guys assume they’d succeeded in getting Joe on the first attempt, rather than giving them a chance to make a second one. Unfortunately that does still leave us with one problem.”

“Which is?” Franky asked.

Joe’s expression was virtually unreadable. “Polly.”

Franky muttered something under her breath; Dex thought it sounded rather like, “And why am I not surprised?”

Whatever it was, Joe and her brother ignored it. 

“You see,” Joe said, addressing himself primarily to Dex, “She’d managed to insinuate herself into our baronet’s house-party - quite successfully, it seems -”

“He was all over her at the Hunt Ball,” Charlie put in. His sister wrinkled her nose as if she detected a bad smell under it.

“He would be. I hope she remembered to pack her biggest and most idiotic hats.”

“Hats?” Dex hazarded. “Why hats?”

Franky smiled, sphinx-like. “Hat pins. A girl’s ever-present help in time of trouble.”

Charlie looked pained. “I doubt that having to deter the randy baronet from getting fresh with her is Polly’s biggest problem at this precise moment, you know. After all, the cover story she went in there with was that she might be able to act as a bridge to talk Joe into lining his Legion up with the New Jacobite Brotherhood, or whatever they call themselves. If they were sending planes to take him down before she’d had time to unpack her case, it hardly looks as if they’d bought into that one, now, does it?”

Dex felt a pang of guilt, almost as though he had ever wished her dead himself, though he hadn’t, not truly - just extremely successful, and incredibly rich and mind-bogglingly famous, and a very, very long way away from Joe -

He chose his next words with considerable care. “You mean, Polly’s life might actually be in danger?”

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” Joe said soberly. “If they suspect she might be a plant - well, who knows?”

“An accident would be so easy to arrange,” Charlie added. “A loosened girth - a thorn in the saddle-lining -“

His sister looked at him as though he had temporarily taken leave of his senses, which took a load off Dex’s mind, since it hardly seemed gentlemanly to question the sanity of a host to whom he had only just been introduced.

“Pongo, are you completely bonkers? You have met Polly, haven’t you? It may be a hunting party she’s joined, but if you seriously think she’s going to do anything more with any quad than teeter down to the stables in those preposterous shoes of hers, expecting every male in sight gallantly to throw his coat across every puddle or patch of horse-droppings in her path, and gingerly pat the nose of whichever one of her host’s horses she thinks sets off her outfit best, then you must be completely crazy.”

“There are other sorts of accidents,” Joe pointed out grimly. Franky snorted.

“There are. And there are other sorts of stupidity, too. Look, both of you - whatever I may have said about the woman in the past, do give her credit for some intelligence. She’s been at the top of a very dirty and very tough profession for a few years now. I may not like what she does, or how she goes about it, but she is bloody good at it. And if you think she hasn’t worked out what the risks are, and how to dodge them, then I suggest you start cultivating white rabbits, because you’re certainly living in Wonderland. If being the honest broker who can bring you into the fold has turned into a liability, she’ll be reinventing herself as official court correspondent to the New Jacobite inner circle. You’ll see.”

Dex could tell that neither Joe nor Charlie shared Franky’s confidence, but they seemed unwilling to pursue the topic in front of her. And the relief after so much strain, and his last unbroken day and a half, and, yes, surely the whisky too were getting to him, so that he wanted nothing more than to lean his head back against the wall, and doze -

Franky was shaking him firmly but not ungently by the shoulder.

“Come on,” she said, in what Joe had once dubbed her “quarter-deck” voice. “Cattsy will have made up one of the spare rooms for you by now. Come on, Dex. You’ll be all the better for a couple of hours sleep before dinner. As, Joe, would you. Don’t bother telling me the quack even told you that you were allowed to get out of bed today. If he did, he deserves shooting. And anyway, Charlie, I need to have a quick family pow-wow with you, since I’m here.”

From the glazed expressions on the faces of the other two, Dex guessed that they, like he, had neither the energy nor the hardihood to resist in the face of Franky’s determination. And anyway, the chance to lie down would be so nice - he could hardly remember when he’d last had the chance to sleep -

He suffered himself to be propelled from the room.


	7. Polly is inquisitive, the plotters are indiscreet, and Miss Kitty O'Farrell has sharper claws than anyone suspected

Polly, as it happened, was at that precise moment neither worrying about fending off Sir Oswald’s unwelcome advances nor about avoiding lethal “accidents”. The principal worry on her plate at the moment was, as a matter of fact, anchovy toast.

Afternoon tea was not a meal she had had occasion to consume before. She had arrived in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, and with the new influx of the house-guests arriving at more-or-less the same time, when the core of the party who were already in residence were out in the countryside in earnest pursuit of foxes, the house was as close to in confusion as a country house with an efficient butler and housekeeper is ever allowed to get. Though someone had offered her tea, she had declined in favour of unpacking: she had abruptly realised that in arriving without a lady’s maid she was in a distinct minority, and she was going to have to get on top of how things were managed here quickly if it were not to show to her disadvantage against the other women in the party.

Yesterday, being Sunday, there had been no hunting, and she had started to get her bearings; sounding out the other members of the house party.

Most, she didn’t doubt, were exactly what they seemed; a cross-section of the leisured upper classes, with little on their minds beyond fox-hunting by day and the odd hand of solo whist of an evening, and no desire to go seeking any risk beyond that posed by the next five-barred gate, or a spread misere with a shilling or so too many riding on each point. The two young officers who’d captured her the previous day after lunch, and insisted on taking her out for a long country walk, allegedly to view some Roman remains in the next parish were, she concluded, if anything less complex below the surface than they seemed on an initial meeting.

But there were others - whose conversations abruptly cut off or were awkwardly turned when she entered the room - there were hints, and lifted eyebrows - odd gestures and emphases on particular words -

Yes. Even though her host had yet to elaborate upon the hints he had dropped to her at the Hunt Ball, and she had caught him more than once looking at her, when he thought himself unobserved, with a sidelong, enigmatic smile, there was very definitely something going on here. And Polly knew, with a sure reporter’s instinct that had never let her down yet, that she was unquestionably in the right place.

afternoon tea any less formidable. The gathering in the Blue Drawing Room as the dusk started to draw in outside on that particular November Monday was predominantly middle-aged, if not elderly, and overwhelmingly dominated by the Amazons. The younger and more active portion of the party was out chasing foxes, and her host, having looked in on the tea-party for long enough to exchange a few sardonic remarks with the assembled company, had withdrawn pleading pressure of business to the estate office, a male lair located, Polly had ascertained on her casually nosy wander round the house on Saturday, off a little corridor that led the the gun-room and, ultimately, to the stable-yard.

No such retreat was possible for a mere guest, and Polly found herself trying to cope simultaneously with toast smeared with the aforementioned anchovy paste, an odiferous and salty spread, and being the subject of an interrogation which was no less far-reaching for being conducted in high, silvery, well-bred accents, and no less barbed for all it was set amid the bone-china and chintz of the elegant drawing room.

Humiliatingly, Polly abruptly realised about two minutes into her ordeal, the ladies of the party seemed in little doubt about the nature of the interest their host might be supposed to have in her, and the main thrust of their veiled questioning seemed aimed at discovering how far he might as yet have managed to get. Glancing around in the hope of lighting on something which would enable her to change the conversation without it looking too defensive, she caught out of the tail of her eye some movement outside the window. On pretext of refilling her plate, she got up and sauntered across the room, noting as she did so that a car which had drawn up for long enough only to deposit a passenger was driving off again, and that a small, slight figure in a soft hat, carrying only a light attache case, was moving briskly up the shallow flight of steps to the front door.

She substituted cucumber sandwiches for anchovy toast, and returned thoughtfully to her seat. Not an overnight visitor, evidently, given his absence of luggage - and even in a brief glimpse his finicky precision of dress and manner gave the lie to his being a sportsman. But if he were an ordinary visitor the laws of the Medes and the Persians - or at least, the code of hospitality which governed English country house visiting - would decree that a guest arriving at that hour had to be shown into the Blue Drawing Room to take tea with his hostess. No possible excuse of errand or urgency - short, perhaps, of bereavement or declaration of war - could possibly exempt him.

Minutes passed, and the door to the drawing room remained resolutely closed.

Polly made up her mind. With just so much carefully suppressed anguish injected into her expression as to suggest acute intestinal discomfort clamped down under an iron stoicism, she bent over towards her hostess, a dowager aunt of Sir Oswald’s doing duty in place of his absent wife, and murmured something about an urgent need to powder her nose. Her hostess, assessing her expression with shrewd but not unkindly bead-black eyes, nodded sympathetically. Within seconds Polly was out in the deserted passage and making for the corridor to the estate office.

Native caution bade her take care. She could have no legitimate excuse for being in this part of the house at this time. When - almost at her destination - she heard booted footsteps ringing on the stone-flagged floor round a bend in the corriedor ahead of her she grabbed the handle of the nearest door and took hasty refuge inside the broom-cupboard it revealed.

There was a brief, staccato exchange from outside the broom-cupboard; one of the grooms being ordered to take someone’s horse and look sharp about it, hey! Evidently one of the hunters had returned early from the day’s sport. And Polly’s pulse quickened as she recognised his voice: Hanrahan, the rawboned middleaged bruiser with the rakish air, who had arrived slightly late for dinner the previous day. A little out of place among the smooth aristocrats at the table, he had stood out with the vulgar vitality of a farmyard cockerel amid a flock of white peacocks. He manufactured something or other, Polly gathered, and was rumoured to have made an immense fortune out of the Great War. He was definitely one of those in the party Polly had had her eye on.

There was the sound of another door opening, frighteningly close to her lair. Polly heard Sir Oswald say, “You’re late. Dr Fischer has little time to spare for us this afternoon, and we can’t afford to waste a minute, given Saturday’s events.”

The other man gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Well, Dr Fischer; it’s harder than you might think engineering a plausible-looking tumble out in the field. I had to pick my time and my landing. Wouldn’t have been any use with a broken neck, would I? Too many of those around this weekend, anyhow, it looks like.”

“Indeed.” The third voice had a precise, almost foreign intonation, though no discernable accent. “Your caution does you credit, Hanrahan. Would others in our movement had displayed the like quality. Not merely crashing the Avro, but so publicly - and leaving the wreckage to be crawled over by every intelligence agency the British Government possesses. It has taken me the best part of two days to ensure that one of our people is in control of the investigation, and there can, of course, be no guarantee that his control will be adequate to prevent further damage. And there remains the question of the Warhawk debris -“

Sir Oswald interrupted. “What I’d like to know is which qualified imbecile gave the order to ambush Sullivan in the first place? From the line his girlfriend was spinning at the Hunt Ball I’d had him marked down as all but a supporter - and no-one can deny that bringing in the Flying Legion on our side when the balloon goes up could avoid a lot of trouble -“

Polly suppressed a gasp of shock, and bent her ear closer to the broom cupboard door. The almost-foreign voice spoke again; she could all-but hear the shrug of the shoulders which accompanied it.

“Well, that is, of course, regrettable. Had you seen fit to advise the central committee of your manoeuvrings in that direction, possibly something could have been contrived. Though, to be frank - we are, of course, all friends, and friends must and should be frank with each other - I believe the young lady may have been more optimistic about her chances of enlightening Sullivan than his history warranted. And, in any event, however strong your argument, the committee would have found it difficult to resist yet another attractive young lady with tough and influential connections, who was most adamant that eliminating Sullivan was her down payment for bringing her friends in on our side.”

Hanrahan emitted a grunt of surprise. “The O’Farrell floosie insisted on having Sullivan rubbed out? What had he ever done to her?”

“Alas.” Dr Fischer’s voice had a hint of a cold amusement in it which sent shivers down Polly’s spine. “I may be able to unlock the laws of physics and fathom the deepest secrets of the universe, but the ways of women and their vendettas remain a mystery to me. Suffice it to say: she raised her pretty hand to condemn Sullivan to death, and the deed was done.”

Sir Oswald made a tetchy sound. “Regrettably.”

“No doubt. But Miss O’Farrell has a wholly accurate estimate of her own importance to us. As you know, we must have the IRA disturbances in Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast to keep the Navy occupied, or his chances of ever setting foot upon British soil become much weaker.”

“What I’d like to know,” Hanrahan broke in, “is that we are sure Lewis did down Sullivan before he crashed. Trading two for one I could just about stomach - though the Avro set me back a pretty penny - but two down for no return just isn’t a business proposition.”

Dr Fischer sounded tetchy. “Our information is good. But here is not the place to stand discussing it - nor the other news I’ve brought for you. Mosley, if you would be so good as to lead the way - “

There was the sound of footsteps departing, and then a click of a door shutting. Polly was out of the broom cupboard and heading for the stairs in an instant. She needed time to herself and a space in which she could think - and also, no mind whatsoever to leave her whereabouts unexplained, if anyone sought to enquire. Within two minutes she was lying on her bed, a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on her forehead, and her limbs draped across the counterpane in an attitude of pitiable feebleness.

It was as well she had had foresight. She had barely been in position five minutes when there came a soft scratching at the bedroom door.

“Come in,” Polly called, in a soft voice suitable for her assumed invalid status. The door opened to reveal a neatly dressed maid, muttering some platitude about presenting madam’s compliments, and was there anything she might do to help, miss?

For verismilitude’s sake, Polly dispatched her on a quest for aspirin, and sank back amid the pillows, her mind racing.

For, of course, a solicitous hostess might naturally be concerned about a guest who vanished early from tea, apparently in ill-health. But Polly had endeavoured, to the best of her acting ability, to convey to her hostess that the nature of her indisposition was one with which any woman might sympathise, but into which no lady would be indelicate enough to enquire further. And, what was more, she could have sworn that her hostess had taken the point.

It occurred to Polly, with a nasty jolt of apprehension just under her solar plexus, that her alibi had just been checked. And checked, moreover, by people she had just heard plotting treason on the grandest of scales, and who were plainly accustomed to ordering murder with the casualness with which she, Polly, might order a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and who had, they believed, just murdered Joe in cold blood. Polly gritted her teeth and uttered a stern injunction to herself, lest the fear and horror that news unleashed turned her to a useless, gibbering wreck.

They had not, it seemed, found a body. And without a body, all their confidence was the merest supposition. She knew - who better? - about Joe’s ability to cheat death and confound fate, no matter how black the picture might appear.

In any event, any hint to her host or his friends that she had heard any rumour of any such tragedy would betray that she had been eavesdropping.

She stole a quick glance at the delicate gold watch on her wrist. In less than two hours the bell would signal dressing for dinner. And she dare not miss it; her host would certainly be on the lookout for any unusual behaviour. She would have to attend, and swap repartee, and act as though she hadn’t a care in the world, and as if there was no shadow of dread gnawing at her insides. In short, Polly realised, she was going to have to act for her very life. And no-one would excuse her if she missed a cue, or muffed her lines.


	8. In which the Omniscient Author realises at last that there is such a things as the Trade Descriptions Act, and that this is a slash novel

Some charitable soul had lit a fire in his room while they had all been at dinner, and there was a sofa piled with soft cushions in once vivid, now time-mellowed oriental fabrics pulled up next to it. Dutifully, Dex tried going over Charlie's rough sketches, balancing a portable writing desk on his knee, but his brain was too fuddled by strain and lack of sleep to make any sensible contributions to them: proper analysis would have to wait until the morning. 

Those deep glowing caverns in the heart of the aromatic wood fire were mesmerising; they caught and held his attention, so he could barely have said whether he slept or waked, dreamt or thought. At length he bestirred himself, exchanged his long-worn clothes for pyjamas, shrugged on a borrowed dressing-gown and slippers, and headed for the bathroom at the far end of the passage. 

A bath would be welcome after his exertions of the last twenty-four hours. Of course, he had had a hasty wash and brush up before dinner, in an attempt to render himself less unworthy of the panelled oak and the seventeenth-century silverware. Nonetheless, he had felt awkward and out of place while Franky - crisp in uniform - and her immaculately tuxedoed brother had swapped obscure quips over the turbot in the glow of the candles. If it hadn't been for Joe - bruised, bloody and in pyjamas on the other side of the table, and no less mocking and unabashed for all of his current disadvantages - he'd have been tempted to run screaming into the inhospitable November night. And it had, after all, been a relief when Franky, pleading the demands of duty, had insisted on heading off on the lonely drive back to Portland, and Charlie, claiming his stump was chafing, had retired to his quarters in the further wing of the big house.

Which still left the enigma of Joe, who had vanished somewhere after throwing on a coat and gumboots to see Franky to her car in the cold and misty dark, and whom he dared not enquire after for fear of attracting too much of the wrong sort of attention - and, to say truth, because he was too thoroughly intimidated by the glacial, impeccably trained serving staff who moved here and there about the place, anticipating one's wants with a near-telepathy, and freezing one with waves of unspoken, palpable disdain.

At least the water, once he achieved the sanctity of the bathroom at the end of the passage, was boiling. He drifted deep into its embrace, suspended between sleep and wakefulness, only roused when he heard a noise between a knock and a scratch at the bathroom door.

"Wha-?"

"Dex?"

His heart suddenly started pounding. It was with an enormous effort he conquered his voice enough to say, steadily, "Sure, Joe. What do you want?"

"Sorry to disturb your bath, but I have to talk to you. About the Legion, and how they're going to cope. Given that as Charlie said earlier, as there seem to be plenty of people who want me dead it might be easier and simpler if I just decided to be dead until the band starts to play. But that has consequences, Dex. And you're the only person I can trust to deal with them. Can we talk? Say, in about fifteen minutes? In your room?"

Idiotically, he nodded. And then, realising how stupid that was with a shut door between him and his auditor, he said, in a calm, matter-of-fact voice dredged up from a place within himself he didn't know he possessed, "OK, Joe. See you later."

He heard soft padding footsteps diminish down the passage, going away from him.

The hell with lousy British soap! It got everywhere and stung your eyes to streaming, so that anyone who didn't know might think from looking at you - might think -

The hell with all of it!

Dex threw the loofah vindictively against the small opaque pane of the bathroom window.

The dim red glow of the fire, which had fallen to ash and coals while he had soaked in the tub, was the only light in the room as he pushed open the door. He groped his way to the four poster bed; he might as well be warm while he waited for Joe to come and lay down the law about what needed to be done next to save the world.  
Which he would carry out. Of course. To the letter. As he always had, and hang the cost, and what he might ever have wanted - or hoped - or expected - for himself -  
His body, rolling resentfully in between the fine linen sheets hit something warm, solid, and very much alive. His instinctive gasp of shock was abruptly contained; pulled down and muffled against a bare shoulder as darting impertinent hands flickered anywhere and everywhere across his body; going before, behind, between. Soft lips and teasing tongue danced over his ear, caressing a lingering trail along his Adam's apple, and the hollow of his throat -

"Oh, Jeez!" Dex muttered, fighting his way up to coherence past the clamorous blood pounding in his ears. "Why didn't you say? Something? When I was in the bath?"

Joe's voice trembled with laughter almost to over-brimming in the soft, warm, scented dark. "What could I say? Use that genius brain of yours, Dex. Say something? In a house with one cook, one housekeeper, a parlour-maid, a tweeny, and a scullery maid? All of them with two good ears apiece, and minds filthier than an Algerian street drain?"

The note of arrogant possessiveness in the assured familiar voice deepened."Besides - who says I mustn't surprise you if I want to?"

Any response he might have been capable of making was overthrown by the teasing deftness of those invisible fingers which had never stopped moving across his body, fidgeting at the entrance to his borrowed pyjamas, diving in and out between his body and his clothes. Despite himself, he let out an involuntary squeak of sheer pleasure.

"Oh, please. Yes. Yes, there. Right - there. Oh, Cap -"

Suddenly, the fingers were closing in a more determined assault on his clothes, and he found himself suddenly co-operating, frantically kicking at folds of confining fabric, freeing his body from like a swimmer kicking up from deep water from the tangling weeds that drifted treacherously beneath the surface.

Then he was naked; pressed tight against Joe's body. Joe had one arm tight round his shoulders; his other hand was cupping his balls in a warm, assured palm, while his fingers flexed and rubbed and pressed, gentling and dividing, and Dex's whole body arched up as the piercing sweetness tore through him, and his lips were forced hard against Joe's shoulder, and his teeth bit uncontrollably into his flesh and it might all be perversion and un-American to boot, but just this second it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like he was flying, and he wanted it, he wanted it so much, and Joe wanted it too, he could feel that, wanted it desperately and nothing was going to stop them now -

"You know what I thought, when my crate was going down over the sea back there?" The rough, arrogant voice came from somewhere above his left ear. Dex shook his head, wordless. The voice continued. "I thought, 'But I can't die now. There's something I've still got to do.' "

There was a fractional pause, and then that voice again, like honey mixed with rye whiskey. "Lie back, Dex. I want to bring you off. And I promise: when I do it's going to be better than anything you ever felt before. Trust me on that. Call it a bargain I struck with my guardian angel."

The laughter in Joe's voice this time was reckless, abandoned; Dex could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising as he heard it. But oh God how he wanted this - if anyone interrupted them now he'd kill them with his bare hands - he couldn't bear for this to go on unresolved for a moment longer.

"Yes," he muttered. "Oh, yes. Please. Now, Joe. Please."

He hardly needed to have said anything; almost before he had finished Joe's mouth was warm and fierce again on the hollow of his throat, and then Joe's lips were moving down his body with deliciously tantalising slowness; nibbling, nuzzling, circling his nipples with a languorously decadent tongue-tip, and the pleasure was almost unbearable, almost too much for his body to take, even though stopping was unthinkable too - so he couldn't keep silent, even if Charlie did have legions of house servants with filthy minds lurking in the corridors - but then, if he did, they were lost, both of them, and it didn't matter for him but Joe could never bear the slime which would be thrown at his golden reputation if this ever came out, whatever he thought now in the heat of the moment -

Dex choked his moan back with superhuman effort, muffling his mouth in the blanket, stifling it to the barest of choked whimpers. Joe made a protesting noise, and raised his head a fraction from Dex's chest. His voice bore a freight of emotion Dex had not dreamt it could possess.

"Dex! Don't spoil it, please. It doesn't have to be in words - but - Dex - I want to hear you telling me you want this. It - matters to me, Dex. Believe me. It matters."

Dex's hand reached up, catching the back of Cap's head, grasping at his hair, pulling him up to kiss him. Yes: it was clumsy, it was frantic, it was incompetent - jeez, what chances had he ever had to gain experience at this sort of thing? Lips banged on teeth and nose collided with nose. Belatedly, as Joe failed to restrain a gasp of discomfort, Dex remembered that he was manhandling an injured man, one who'd crashed his kite into the ungentle embrace of the English down-lands not forty-eight hours before.

"Oh, God, Cap, I'm so sorry -"

But whatever else his kiss wasn't, it had been unequivocal. Joe was, despite his pain, responding with blazing passion, and something else; something Dex found almost incomprehensible, and which he was hard pressed to put a name to, though there were several which seemed almost appropriate.

_Gratitude. Relief. Homecoming._

"Oh, God, I want you, Dex. I've wanted you for so long. Let me - "

There was a pricking behind Dex's eyes, thankfully invisible in the sheltering dark. But he made his voice steady, firm, unequivocal. "Then take me, Cap. Now. 'Cause I can't bear to wait any longer. And that's God's honest truth."

There was the briefest of pauses. And then - 

Joe ducked beneath the bedcovers to take Dex within his mouth, and Dex lost his last vestiges of discretion and moaned aloud. His hips pushed upwards of their own accord, and his hands reached out in the darkness, one cupping round the back of Joe's head, tangling his fingers in his hair, pulling him down on him, and the other sliding urgently across Joe's chest. With a deft wriggle, his tongue and lips hell-bent on demonstrating to Dex throughout the manoeuvre just what pleasure meant (and his heart now was pounding so hard he spared a fraction of a thought for what would happen if his chest just exploded now, so why he hadn't heard of more people perishing that way before?), Joe twisted his whole body through ninety degrees and raised his head momentarily to hiss his words into the bedroom dark.

"Dex - I want to feel your hand on me when you -"

It was an invitation to which he must respond.

His fingers reached out, fumbling in the darkness, closed around Joe's dick, and started to stroke. And he had never known anything in his life which had the power to move him like the way Joe thrust up to his questing palm, or how Joe's soft, broken, muffled moan reached into some place deep inside him, and pierced through every last barrier he had.

"Oh, Jeez," Dex gasped, as his every muscle tensed and his body arched, rigid, for a split second before he abandoned himself totally and release swept through him in shuddering waves. His fingers bit deep as they clasped Joe's shoulders as though he needed to cling on for dear life or risk being overwhelmed in the flood; swept away into the thundering darkness and lost forever.

"Yes!" Joe's voice had a fierce note of exultation in it. And then, less certainly, "Good?"

The sudden note of diffidence in his voice evoked a spike of tenderness. Dex clutched at him, pulling him close. His tongue felt thick in his mouth; his body spent, but while he struggled to gather his thoughts so as to say something he found, miraculously, that his hands, at least, were still capable of communicating. Dex could feel Joe relax under his stroking fingers, and his hands wandered almost at will over Joe's naked body, skimming over scars and tight bands of muscle, lingering suggestively where Joe's sudden half gasps and indrawn breath suggested to Dex that they should. He smiled; a quiet, wholly private smile in the darkness. He might have limited experience at this sort of thing, but it was reassuring to realise that even in this strange new territory the experimental method still held validity. Hypothesise - test - record results - refine procedures - repeat -

"Good? Oh yes. But now -" he breathed, and kicked the bedcovers aside, wriggling down Joe's body, feeling a sense of power he had never felt before as his mouth closed around Joe's dick and he heard Joe's breathing suddenly become a ragged, urgent panting. Joe's hands on the back of his head forced him harder down on him, and he heard a broken off gasp as his lips pushed back Joe's foreskin and then he started to do things with his tongue he'd never even dreamed of doing to anyone before, but from the sounds Joe was making and the frantic movements of his body beneath him they seemed to be the right things, so clearly the experimental method was working here, too -

"Oh my God, yes -!"

Joe came, abruptly, in a warm salty flood in his mouth, and Dex, caught unawares, spluttered and coughed frantically.

By the time he had recovered himself Joe had switched on the bedside light, and was looking down at him with a quizzical, half-contrite, half-amused expression on his face.  
"Sorry about that, Dex. But then, I never claimed to be a gentleman."

His arms were open, inviting, his eyes dancing. Dex, his limbs leaden, crawled gratefully into his embrace. Joe's arms tightened around him, and somewhere at that moment fighting the waves of lassitude became too much of an effort. He rested his head on Joe's chest, closed his eyes and let the warm darkness take him.  
There was a hand, stroking his hair. There was a warm, even sound of breathing from inches above his head. There was - he reached out exploring fingers - the smooth muscularity of someone's chest under his cheek.

"Joe?"

"Mm? Expecting to wake up next to someone else, were you? Should I know about this?"

A flood of embarrassment swept hotly through him. "I fell asleep?"

The stroking hand never faltered, nor did the familiar voice lose its amused note. "Well, you know, it's traditional."

With a tremendous struggle he opened his eyes. The bedside light was on, and the fire was still glowing; he could hardly have slept that long, then. And Joe - 

Dex pushed himself up on one elbow. He had watched the Captain's face for years, now; seen him both victorious and all-but-beaten; seen him desperate, furious, triumphant, defensive, sulky, defiant, provocative and merely bored.

He had never seen - what he now saw in Joe's face under the reflected lamplight. His kiss-swollen lips. His tumbled hair. His eyes - oh God, his eyes -

_That was what I did?  
Me?_

Their eyes met, and then Joe was kissing him again, with a thoroughness that, Dex thought wildly and perhaps a little hysterically, suggested he'd been called upon to provide a complete relief map of his tongue and tonsils , and he was determined to ensure that no-one criticised him for inadequacy of the survey data.

"God," Joe muttered as they pulled apart, "that gets harder to stop each time I start. Look, Dex, I could stay here all night but - I should be getting back to my own bed. Franky wasn't joking about what the quack said, and you - you need your sleep - after all, there's a plane you've got to rebuild in the morning -"

Involuntarily, he groaned. He had, in the events of the last few hours, forgotten the Warhawk.

"How bad is it? Really? No bullshit, Joe." He tried not to let the scolding note creep into his voice. Joe made an airy gesture, but there was something about the lines of his face which belied his confidence.

"Well, nothing you can't fix, Dex -"

Briefly, in a white-hot flash of anger, he wondered whether there was some rule of formal etiquette - obviously it wouldn't be the kind of thing that made it to the pages of Emily Post, but surely it must have been dealt with somewhere, and research would find it - which dictated how shortly after hot, amazing and in all respects bone-dissolvingly ecstatic love-making it was OK to strangle one's lover for being an inconsiderate ass-hole, with no respect whatsoever for the complexities of delicate engineering and a general attitude towards the workshop staff that "the impossible they do at once; miracles take a little longer". And then a saving wave of humour swept over him. 

"You cheapskate bastard," he hissed. Joe's head reared up from the pillow.

"Wha- ?"

"Well -" He was really getting into this now; the fun of having pushed Joe off balance for once was getting into his blood. "Your girls all get dinner and a movie, but all I get is a spanner and instructions to sort out whatever lash-up you've put onto the fuel line this time - call that a date, Joe?"

And, belatedly, Joe was seeing the funny side too; they were in each other's arms and giggling like teenagers. Until, abruptly, Joe caught Dex's chin in one hand, tipping it up until he could look straight into Dex's eyes. His voice was serious.

"Look, Dex: there is one other thing I need you to do. Beside fixing the kite."

He'd been prepared for that; he'd worked it all out for himself in the bath, half a life-time ago. Suddenly sobered, he nodded. "I know, Cap. The Legion."

Joe's eyes fixed on his with absolute concentration. "I need you to go back and find out what's happening. Once they get rumours I've died the men could be trouble. And there's the contract, too - You do know; you're the only one I could trust to handle something like that, don't you?"

He kissed him lightly on the forehead. "Don't stay too long. I need you too much here. And watch after yourself. The bad guys will be after you, too. And I couldn't bear - Travel incog, and travel fast. Davies can get you fake ID that should pass. I'd go in via the St Lawrence route if I were you - pretend to be Canadian if you think you can manage the accent. Find out what you can about what's been happening over there. Unless you think there's good reason not to, leave Sandy in charge. He hasn't a lot of imagination, but he's dead straight, and won't be bullied in a hurry. Tell them I'm missing, but don't be too specific about where I might have gone down. Just say you're coming back to Europe to co-ordinate the search. After all, whatever they believe, they'll know you won't be likely to leave the last place I was seen alive without body parts and accounted-for wreckage. And a coroner's report. In triplicate."

Dex blinked; his vision was suddenly blurred. It wasn't that the fact came as any surprise to him; just that it hadn't occurred to him to realise that Joe knew it, too. Had, from the matter of fact way he said it, known it for some time, too.

Joe gave him a quick squeeze around his shoulders. "Anyway. Get your sleep out." There was a faint thread of laughter in his voice, and in the crinkles around his eyes and mouth. "Don't look so stricken, Dex, there's a good boy. There's at least forty-eight hours work for the two of us on that crate, and I spotted some more-than-adequately appointed mechanics' quarters at the back of the hangar. We'll manage, never fear."

With another kiss he was gone.

Dex stretched out in the great four-poster between the fine linen of the sheets; alone but, for the first time he could remember, no longer lonely. His skin still tingling with the feel of remembered caresses, he fell asleep to the sounds of owls hooting from the park outside.


	9. Charlie meets a long-lost relative, and realises how he may be able to rescue Polly

The Commissionaire was accustomed to summing up visitors with a practised eye. Indeed, had his education taken more of a classical turn (rather than the severely practical bent imposed by a lifetime avoiding the missiles first flung at him by a drunken and brutish father, and later, rather more skilfully, by a selection of the Empire’s enemies across the globe) he might have likened himself to Cereberus; guarding the entrance to his employer’s preserves with unsleeping vigilance.

He had, therefore, pegged the thin, dark man whom the unostentatiously expensive car had dropped at the front door as a former officer - though he hesitated momentarily about which branch of the Services - before he had finished extricating himself from the rear seat. That being so, the stiffness of his walk and the fact that an elegant ebony cane was taking most of his weight as he climbed laboriously up the four shallow steps that led to the front door explained themselves.

The Commissionaire drew himself up with the proper air of respect towards one who had been wounded in the King’s service. Then he caught a better glimpse of those strong, sallow features and braced to attention with the rigid alacrity and severe precision that he had last assumed for the benefit of Lord Kitchener; no-one, in his opinion, having warranted that much respect since. The visitor acknowledged him with a brief, unsmiling nod, and passed on through the imposing entrance and into the panelled foyer.  
The Commissionaire knew that foyer well: he supervised the daily ceremony of waxing the heavy oak panelling and the polishing of every scrap of brass in the room to a high lustre. He prided himself that if the Victorian founders of the building could step down from the portraits which were the first thing which struck any visitor who entered, they would find nothing lacking which elbow grease and attention to detail could provide to keep the prestige of the Company as it entered its tenth decade as high as it had ever stood.  
The gentleman who had just arrived, the Commissioner recognized, lacked only the whiskers and stiff collar of a bygone day to have been the original of one of those portraits.

\----

“Good,” Charles Cook said, supporting himself with one hand on the mahogany table as he rose to his feet. “That’s settled, then.”

McPherson eyed him severely. “Imph. Well. I’m no saying it canna be done - nor that we canna do it in the time - though ye’ll have to bear in mind that the price will have to take into account that the design was no the Company’s, and so we cannot guarantee to make it without the costs of a redesign.”

He tapped the blueprint on the table. “That is, should your initial design no prove feasible in practice.”

Cook’s voice was blandly non-committal. “I don’t think you need be worried about that. After all; I talked my young cousin Paul into drawing about three-quarters of it, so I hardly think in the circumstances you complain about its pedigree.”

The apparently casual reference to the Chairman’s son and heir was not, of course, accidental. McPherson, however, had been carrying out tougher negotiations than this since the man across the desk had been a little boy in a sailor suit, tagging around the works after his grandfather (who had hoped, vainly it turned out, but for long after McPherson had seen the way the wind was blowing, that the grandson might follow the path his father had already rejected).

He coughed, drily. “I’m no saying anything against young Mr Shuttleworth. I don’t doubt that when the time comes he’ll do the Company credit. But you’ll surely concede that natural engineering skill is nothing without the practical experience to balance it. And he’s only just setting out on the path to acquire that.” He paused, and then, blandly, deployed his own salvo. “Likewise, doubtless ye’ll allow that a man born without the aptitude will have no more idea than a babe in arms about how a design fits together; no, not if he worries away at it until the Day of Judgement. And you can never tell who the Lord chooses to give the talent to; it goes by favour and not by birth. A man might miss it completely, notwithstanding his grandfather was one of the finest engineers that ever walked down Sauciehall Street. By which, I hope you’ll forgive me the liberty of asking ye where the other quarter of that design came from?”

For a moment, as Charles Cook’s face remained a icy, well-bred blank, McPherson suffered a stab of apprehension; within this building - within large parts of this city, come to think of it - this man was royalty, albeit from a cadet branch, and royalty was not noted for its tolerance of impertinence from commoners. And then Cook grinned, and McPherson recognised at last the cheeky little boy he had once known. 

“Not me, if that’s where your worries about feasibility are coming from. I know where my talents lie. I got the notion to see if it could be done, but then I went to the two best people I could find to work out the details. An American chap m’sister introduced me to was the other one. Given what I’ve heard about him, I doubt you’d need to worry about his aptitude or his experience.”

McPherson’s eyebrows went up. “I take it that would be the laddie Andrew McAllister had running his shop floor for a few weeks? Man, from all I’ve heard about him, then I’m prepared to shave the design contingency in the price; I’m no expecting in that case we’ll be needing more of a redesign than just fine tuning, maybe.”

He picked up his pen, dipped it in the ink-well, and scratched out a figure on the draft estimate they had been poring over for the last hour, substituting another for it. Cook reached his hand across the desk, and shook McPherson’s firmly.

“I’m glad to see we could reach agreement,” he said. “No doubt you’ll be contacting me in a day or so when your accounts department has had a chance to pull together the formal paperwork and got me a contract to sign.”

McPherson, agreeing that indeed, it would have to be so, and opining that the modern mania for documenting every last comma of what should be an agreement between gentlemen was a sad reflection on the age, but unfortuately a necessary evil, saw his unexpected visitor all the way to the front entrance, and waited with him, making inconsequential small talk, while the Commissionaire summoned up his car from whatever place Cook’s chauffeur had found to wait out the time of Cook’s visit. That courtesy performed, McPherson returned to his desk, remembering the little boy who had once run everywhere at twice the speed anyone else found necessary, and sighed inwardly over the pity and waste of war, wondering idly whether Andrew McAllister had been right to choose a modest living where he would be able to sell the fruits of his brain and hands where he would, and decline to sell them as his conscience moved him, rather than being bound to the service of an implacable monster that churned out endless iron engines of death, and sold them with pitiless impartiality to those who had the money to pay for them, without sympathy for those who fell victim to their bite.

He roused himself from his reverie; it was, after all, not proper to indulge in such thoughts. Not on the Company’s time. And at least the current project was one which had brought animation to the Squadron-Leader’s sallow face, and a living gleam of interest to his pain-dulled eyes. And that of course made it worth while in itself. He pulled the blueprint towards him, and started to jot down notes for the specification to include in the contract. It would never do not to have that ready when the Squadron-Leader called again in two days time.

But it was not, in fact, two days but rather less than two hours before McPherson was called upon to speak to the Squadron-Leader. The telephone on his desk rang, brassily, and when he picked up the handset he heard Cook’s clipped tones - nevertheless, McPherson felt, with an odd note of hesitancy, almost huskiness about them. He listened for a few minutes, interjecting the odd comment, trying to keep the note of surprise out of his voice. After Cook had rung off he paused for a moment in thought, and then hit the brass bell on his desk. A diminutive messenger boy appeared.

“My compliments to Miss McGinty,” he said, “And would she do me the courtesy of stepping across for a word at her convenience?”

As he had expected, Miss McGinty’s convenience suited his own within rather less than two minutes. He rapidly outlined the request that Charles Cook had just made. As he might have predicted, her thick brows drew down in thunderous disapproval.

“He asked for what?”

“Mr Cook -” consciously, McPherson found himself stressing the surname, “requested that we second a member of staff to him to act as liasion between the Works and himself during the term of the project. You can no’ say the request is an unreasonable one, especially given as he is situated. And he stresses he is quite prepared to allow the Company to include the costs on the overhead and charge that to the project at a very fair rate. Per diem.”

Miss McGinty drew herself up, and uttered a snort which in its sonorousness and volume could have substituted without effort for the foghorn on an Atlantic liner. “Mister McPherson! What this young man is asking for is one of my gels!”

”He’s no so young as all that,” McPherson observed mildly. “He’ll no see forty again.”

Miss McGinty shook her head dismissively. “His age, as you very well know, Mr McPherson, has nothing to do with it. In my experience, men will be men provided they’re given the opportunity.”

“Maybe, then, in the circumstances, I should be sending out for a chaperone,” McPherson observed. “I shouldna care to think I’d risked compromising your reputation, Miss McGinty.”

Miss McGinty treated this levity with the contempt it deserved, and stuck doggedly to the main point. “I’ll no have it said that the Company are no better than white slave traders.”

McPherson blinked. “Come now, Miss McGinty. You no think you’re maybe overstating the case?”

She looked narrowly at him over the top of her steel-rimmed glasses. “You’ll be bearing in mind that given the circumstances the lassie will be spending much of her time staying in his house? And him an unmarried man, and not even his mother or a sister at home keeping house for him -”

He sighed. “Times have changed, Miss McGinty, since our young days. And maybe for the better, at that. After all -” It was daring, but perhaps, after all, it was worth it. “No matter what the rules were in our young days, I’m sure we can all remember that those who wanted to, managed to get round them without trouble. Indeed - perhaps it gave them a bit more fun.”

Miss McGinty’s face looked thunderous again; he pressed on before she could get a word in edgeways.

“And after all, you’ll please bear in mind that the lassie is Mr Cook’s cousin, of sorts. Whatever his intentions may be, I’ve no doot he could put them into effect at a great deal less inconvenience and cost to himself than by any shennaigans around this contract.” He took a deep breath and pressed on. “Unless you have reason to believe the lassie’s flightier than most?”

Miss McGinty pursed her lips. But, as surely as McPherson could rely on her instinctive disapproval of anything novel, he could also rely on her sense of justice. Reluctantly, she shook her head.

“No. She’s hot-headed and maybe opens her mouth when she’d do better to keep it shut, but she’s no fast. And she’s a head on her; and maybe it’s wasted where she is. I’ve more than a suspicion she’s better suited for figures than for filing; had the Dear chosen to have her born a boy she’d no doubt have been more of a credit to the Company than some of the bright sparks in the drawing office.”

McPherson looked up, sharply. Miss McGinty, realising a little too late that she had, perhaps, said a little too much, permitted her face to relax into a wintry smile.

“Aye, well, The Dear works in mysterious ways. And no-one can doubt she’s a clever lassie, and likely to do the Company credit if Mr Cook gives her fair opportunity, and if it is her brains he wants from her.” She rose to her feet. “I’ll arrange to have her sent in, shall I?”

He nodded, a little stunned at the speed with which her resistance had collapsed. Once her black-crepe back had vanished through the door to his office he even allowed himself a small smile. He took care, however, to erase all traces of it before a small tap at the door announced the arrival of Helen Adamson.

\----

Charlie Cook had no intention, on leaving McPherson’s office, of taking any girl out to lunch; still less someone he vaguely remembered from a family funeral years ago as a gawky adolescent; with visible safety pins holding her together and a general air of resentment at the world in general. But Dex had mentioned her, with approval, as having her head screwed on and had taken her into his confidence about the conspiracy. And Joe had endorsed his viewpoint, and added the rider that he also thought she was “fun”. Which had caused him to blink a bit; the Helen Adamson he remembered had looked as though she didn’t know what fun meant, and that she’d have been more than likely to plant a punch on any man who showed any inclination to demonstrate. Which would be shortly before Hell froze, for any normal man, Charlie Cook considered.

His car had arrived; McPherson, muttering some final nothings - he liked the old man, but God! did he go on! - had bowed civilly back inside the colonnaded façade of the Company (briefly, it occurred to him to wonder how his life might have altered had he succumbed to his grandfather’s golden promises, and dedicated his life to the iron machine within). He was in the process of inserting himself into the rear compartment when a vicious little squall swept across the City, driving passers-by into doorways, brushing in waves over the suddenly empty street. The weather added an infuriating extra dimension, meaning he had to struggle to manage his stick and coat, while somehow at the same time clinging onto his hat. The chauffeur was already in the driving seat, his head bent over the controls; no help there. Then, with one particularly vicious gust, it all fell apart. His gaberdine, caught by the gusting wind, blew up around his head, knocking his hat sideways. His despairing grab proved futile; the hat, eluding his snatching fingers, went bowling merrily away down the road. Furthermore, his reckless move had put too much weight on his artificial leg. 

Charlie went over into a heap in the gutter. The papers he had been clutching, which McPherson had insisted on encumbering him with, blew away in a wild snowstorm, flapping into puddles, wrapping themselves around lamp-posts. The chauffeur, finally aware of his master’s plight, scurried round from the driver’s side, making clucking noises and attempting to pull him to his feet in a way that managed to combine the maximum of ineffectiveness, humiliation, and - since his artificial leg was now buckled beneath him - acute pain.

Charlie’s patience snapped. He threw off the chauffeur’s helping hand, grabbed hold of the edge of the car-door frame, dragged himself up to a standing position, and, still breathing heavily from the exertion, abandoned the habit of a lifetime and launched into a torrent of scathing invective. The chauffeur reeled back under the onslaught, and Charlie felt a pang of guilt; it was, of course, hardly sporting to take it out on a man whose position prevented his answering back.

A brightly interested voice at his elbow caused his face to flame. “Golly! I haven’t heard language like that since I stopped running the Guide troop in our village back home. And I don’t think you repeated yourself once. That’s jolly impressive, you know.”

He turned, stammering apologies - what could he possibly have been thinking of, even to take the most outside of chances of using those expressions in the presence of a lady?

He found a hat full of pieces of damp rescued paperwork being held out to him.

“I’m pretty certain I collected all of it. At least; there may be the odd sheet under the car that I’ve missed, but otherwise I don’t think you ought to have lost any of them.”

She grinned cheerfully across at him. Her hair was either plastered across her forehead or hung in dripping rat tails down her back. She was coatless: she must have gambled on the Glasgow weather holding during her lunch hour. The gamble had misfired; a blouse which might once have been a pale blue was darkly sodden, and the cardigan clung around her like seaweed. But her eyes sparkled with a grand indifference to her currently bedraggled state and she had saved his paperwork. And his hat.

And blood, after all, was supposed to be thicker than water. Even without the safety-pins and the sulky expression it was quite clear who she was.

“Get in, Helen,” he said, holding the door open for her. “You can’t possibly go back to the office looking like an Irish water-spaniel after a hard day’s snipe shooting. I’m taking you back to my hotel and I’m going to ask the staff to towel you down and find you a blouse that looks more like a piece of clothing than a sponge. And when they’ve made you presentable, you can join me in the dining room for lunch.”

She lifted her eyebrows with faint surprise, but made no demur as she hopped into the back of the car. “I hadn’t expected you’d recognise me."

He shrugged. “I knew you were up here. Aunt Catherine was at Iphegenia’s wedding, and she said that you’d taken a job with the Company to fill in time before you got married.”

Helen’s snort was prolonged and startlingly unladylike; Charlie couldn’t imagine even Franky emitting such a sound.

“Honestly! I keep telling and telling Mummy not to keep coming out with such nonsense.” She looked him straight in the face. “No: I am not filling in time here till I can find someone to marry me. I’m filling in time here until I can find someone to take me to Samarkand. Actually.”

He laughed aloud - but cut it short when he caught sight of her hurt expression. He made his voice more gentle. “You know, it isn’t nearly as romantic as it’s cracked up to be -”

Helen glared at him. “That’s exactly what Joe said. Look; does it occur to either of you that I might want to go and see for yourself?” She turned her head away, looking out through the rain-streaked car window. “Men!” she hissed at no-one in particular, but there was a slight shake in her voice. Charlie felt a sudden flash of sympathy - he remembered long-ago voices telling him that flying machines were an interesting novelty but a wealthy young man, with a plurality of more serious concerns, had no occasion to dabble in such frivolities. 

With sympathy came inspiration. “Look - Helen -”

She turned at the sound of her name. 

“I can’t offer you Samarkand, but there is a job I can think of you would be just right for. But I’m afraid it might be a bit risky -”

As he had expected, the word “risky” worked on her rather as the whiff of prime sirloin might have done on the spaniel he had compared her to. Her eyes were alight with interest.

“Do you remember that American journalist friend of Joe’s? He said you’d met her?”

Her brow furrowed in thought. “Patty? Philly? Something like that. Yes; I remember. The blonde one with the shoes - I can’t imagine how she walks on them without turning her ankle, can you? Fabulous clothes and very chic, and all that, but a bit silly, I thought. What about her?”

Charlie leant over to check that the glass partition between the rear compartment and the driver’s seat was properly closed. He trusted his staff, of course, but only up to a point. Given what was at stake, this particular point was not very far away at all.

“Well, I can’t go into a lot of detail at the moment. But she’s gone on an undercover investigation and - well, the situation has changed, and she may not be aware of it, so we’re worried about her. And it isn’t as if Joe or I can go in and alert her to the risks; that would put the fat in the fire, and no mistake. But I’ve just thought. You could get in there.”

“How?” She leaned forward. But they were drawing up to the hotel front door, and he grinned at her. 

“Tell you when you’ve been dried out. See you in the dining room.”

It was, he noted with approval, with commendable promptness that she reappeared. He mentally composed a note of congratulation to the hotel staff; she was now wearing a navy-blue silk blouse cut with a severe elegance, and someone who knew what was what had taken curling tongs to her hair. 

Charlie smiled at her. “I thought, as you were running late as it is, I’d better order for you. But they can always change it if I guessed wrong. Soup and steak OK for you?”

She nodded. And then, as the soup arrived, he expanded upon the flash of inspiration which had come over him in the car.

“You know Great-Aunt Georgiana?”

Helen blinked; her brow furrowed in thought. “The - um - eccentric one with the - um - exciting past?”

He snorted with amusement. “I hardly think, Helen, in the circumstances you need tone down what you really mean for the benefit of my delicate sensibilities, do you? Yes; I do mean the barmy old coot who had a string of highly placed lovers back in the ’70s and ’80s - no, don’t tell me that Aunt Catherine has never gossiped about that to one of her cronies when you were in earshot -”

Helen grinned. “Well; always on a _pas devant les enfants_ basis, natch. But Mummy’s French isn’t as good as she thinks it is, and mine’s better - How will Great Aunt Georgiana help?”

He gestured over the soup dishes. “Great Aunt Georgiana is - I’m given to understand by Iphegenia - writing her Memoirs.” He grinned. “White-haired old gentlemen are no doubt being carted bodily out of clubs where they have had apoplexy at the very thought of it all at this very hour. Probably in two minds about whether it would be worse to feature in them or not to be mentioned at all. Not that it’s likely to happen; first, she’s got to finish them, and secondly she’s got to find a publisher who doesn’t think they’re too hot to handle. Anyway, she has to have a secretary-companion, to help out with the memoirs and because of - um - her other little foibles -”

Helen glanced around the dining room of the hotel. And then, evidently spotting no waiters within earshot, she leaned over, and enquired, hesitantly,“You mean the kleptomania?”

Charlie blinked. He had always suspected from the brief hints he’d picked up over the years that his Aunt Catherine’s intelligence network - albeit mostly limited to small town gossip - was formidable, but this was more detailed than he had expected.

“Well, that among other things,” he said, cautiously. “Anyway, I don’t doubt there’s a vacancy for her secretary-companion at the moment.”

Helen looked at him with cool scepticism. “And why would that be?” she enquired.

He gulped. He had heard that tone of not-in-the-least respectful enquiry from his best NCOs on the eve of some of his toughest battles. For after all, being one of the officer class merely meant that one’s name got associated with the disaster in dispatches, not that one had some supernatural ability to avoid it. And he had certainly never wanted to command men who were thick enough to believe anything different.

“Ah. You want to know why I think Aunt Georgiana will have a vacancy for a secretary-companion at this precise moment?”

Helen nodded. And there was, really, no help for it but the truth. He dropped his head towards his soup plate.

“Probably because she treats them in the way that would cause adverse comment in the mate of a Black Ball Line clipper, in the days of the Cape Horn trade, I expect,” he confessed.

Unexpectedly, she grinned at him across the mulligatawny. “I like it that you aren’t trying to soften the hazards for my benefit. Anyway, even if she does need a companion, why would she take me?”

Charlie eyed Helen cautiously, as a deft waiter removed the soup plates, and another substituted steak.

“Um - impoverished relative in reduced circumstances?” he hazarded. She snorted again, but her head was still cocked at an interested angle; she was listening, at any event. He ploughed on.

”Anyway, if you wrote and asked if a job were going, you might get it. Then it only needs her to take it into her head to visit the Mosleys - and that shouldn’t be too difficult - she’s a distant cousin of the Redesdales anyway, on her mother’s side, and the Mosleys are only about twenty miles away from her place in Northamptonshire, and keep a notoriously excellent cook -“

“Fond of her food, is she?” Helen enquired, keeping up admirably with the pace of a plot which was unfolding before him in all its shining glory, getting more rounded and plausible each second. 

“If it's sufficiently fussy and expensive. Anyway, all you have to do is go along with her when she chooses to pay her visit, find out how Polly’s getting on, and report back. Nothing simpler.”

And he leaned back in his chair and beamed at her across the steak. Helen’s brown creased.

“Yes; I see all that. But aren’t you forgetting one thing? I’ve got a job. It’s not as if I’ve a lady to leisure, to go gallivanting all round the country. And I used all my holiday in August. And I can’t just go AWOL; the McGinty would have my hide, and Mr McPherson would sack me on the spot.”

That, of course, was a facer. But his brain, it appeared, was working overtime today. Inspiration struck once more. Charlie looked at his watch.

“Look; I’ll order the car to take you back to the office. After all, no point in putting any black marks on your record yet. But would you be game, if I could square old McPherson?”  
Wordlessly, she nodded, and then took a look at her own watch, gave a squeak of horror, and almost scurried out of the dining room.

Charlie summoned a waiter to take a message to his driver, finished his steak at leisure, savoured a black coffee afterwards, and then made his way to the nearest phone, whistling slightly.


	10. Joe gets unexpected news of Polly

Joe speared another chunk of tinned ham on the tines of his fork. He munched, contemplatively, flicking through the copy of the _Daily Mail_ which he'd filched from the caretaker's cubby-hole and which was spread out on the work-bench in front of him. Charlie, of course, took in nothing but the _Times_ (and a weekly copy of the _News of the World_ , with a pretence, for decency's sake, that that low-class rag was strictly for the amusement of the kitchen and stable-yard) so it was the first chance Joe had had to find out what the shapers of Middle England's opinions had produced in response to the tendrils that the New Jacobite Brethren had, according to Dex, been extending across all strata of society, in preparation for - what, exactly?

That was, of course, the question. Something big and nasty was undoubtedly in the air, but Joe had as little idea as he had had a fortnight ago about what shape it was likely to take.

The key was Polly, and nothing had been heard from her for over a week now. Joe and Dex (circuitously and by various clandestine means ) had come here, to this neglected, almost deserted little hangar, on the outskirts of a town that was nothing more than an overgrown village, on the bleak uplands of the Northamptonshire/Oxfordshire border. Charlie, who had gone off on some mysterious "business" at the same time, had sent a coded cable from, of all places, Carlisle, saying that he was on the case, and not to worry, but no details had been forthcoming over the next few days.

Joe scanned the headlines. Business as usual, it seemed. Miners striking in the Rhondda; another fiery Parliamentary oration from Winston Churchill warning against ‘lethal complacency’, to the predictable Cabinet lack of response; yet another German coalition Government had fallen - there was 'unrest' reported from the Ruhr; and Il Duce had reviewed his troops in an even more preposterous uniform than he had previously managed - was that really a laurel wreath embossed on a gilded breast-plate? 

Joe, flicking past the news sections in an idle quest to find out how the soccer team he had supported with fanatic enthusiasm in his boyhood had coped under the burden of his last decade's complete indifference, would have passed over the Women's Page without even a cursory glance if Polly's name hadn't leapt straight off the page at him.  
His eye went to the bold black of the headline.

"A New Dawn For Europe?" it enquired, with a smaller headline below which ran "Mosley Says: Women Of Britain Have Key Role In Birth of 'Brave New World' "

His half-eaten lunch forgotten on the work-bench, he tore through the article at speed, and then again at more leisure. And then he let out a low, bemused, whistle.

Franky had been right. If Polly had not succeeded in re-inventing herself as the Court correspondent of the New Jacobite Brethren, she had come pretty close. Of course, Polly had been careful, mindful, as she must be that Mosley was teetering on the brink of treason - indeed, given the subversion of the Fleet signal book, must already have irrevocably committed himself, if he knew anything at all about it. Her tone - relentlessly perky throughout the interview - had been one of nicely calculated scepticism blended with an understated excitement.

_And then I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth unfolding before me._

There was nothing in her questions which anyone reading the interview could hold against her in the event that Mosley was - as Joe fervently hoped he would be - arraigned on a capital charge in the next week or so. But anyone could tell that she was feeding him - he groped for the right phrase and then came up with one of Dex's - sucker pitches.

While Joe was prepared to believe that Polly could be inordinately dense about some matters - specifically, the finer points of human relationships in general, and his with her in particular - he was absolutely certain that she didn’t possess the level of sheer imbecility which her adopted role of adoring handmaiden to the flashy baronet suggested.  
Which meant it had to be a calculated pose.

Judging by the smug air of satisfaction Mosley was projecting throughout the interview, he'd bought into it completely, too.

Joe shook his head in reluctant admiration, and scoured the interview again, for any signs that she was trying to convey any clues about what the plot might be about. It was a futile effort. If she’d put any of it into the _Daily Mail_ , the sub-editor had taken it out again.

Joe put the paper down with an undeniable feeling of relief. He wondered if he ought to cable Charlie to tell him to call off the rescue mission; it seemed that Polly was on top of the situation. No doubt she’d be along as soon as she’d wrung whatever she needed out of Mosley, all cock-a-hoop with her own cleverness.

He grinned. And then he set aside the paper, finished lunch in a couple of quick bites, washed the ham down with a gulp of tea and turned his attention once more to the delicate job of trying to salvage the set of components Dex had just plonked before him on the bench.


	11. Polly makes her feelings plain

Polly had never seen so many people together in daytime during the whole of the time she had been staying with Mosley as were assembled in the Blue Drawing Room for pre-lunch sherry that day. Of course, when the maid had come in to draw back her curtains that morning she had muttered something almost incomprehensible about a hard overnight frost, and its likely impact on the day’s sport, which Polly, still sleep-bemused, had made little of. Its significance now sunk in upon her. Obviously the weather was, for some obscure reason, unsuited for the slaughter of foxes.

The hunters might be baulked of their prey, but it didn’t seem to have dampened their spirits. There was a good deal of chaff floating about, and Polly came in for her fair share of it. Since the _Daily Mail_ article had been published her relations with the rest of the house-party had changed; subtly but profoundly. She fancied she was now able to identify who was a member of the Inner Circle; they were less wary than before about letting their allegiances show. Conversations were not cut off quite so abruptly when she entered the room, and sometimes they would flash her a sly, sidelong smile, as though she was on the edge of being allowed to share a very private joke. But her instincts told her that the pace of events was beginning to increase, too; there was a sense of suppressed excitement in the air. So time was running out; she needed to get that lucky break soon, that would take her from simply floundering around in a morass of half-guesses, hunches and blind instinct to being able to pull the clues and hints she’d picked up on into a coherent whole, to be able to understand what the International Order of New Jacobite Brethren was really playing for.

Not that she doubted for a minute that the break would come. It was only a matter of time; time and trusting her honed reporter’s instincts.

So while she dreaded the interview she would have with her editor about unsanctioned articles for rival proprietors when she finally got back to New York, Polly was hopeful that she would be able to mollify him - eventually - by being able to present him with the scoop of the century.

And save the world along the way, naturally.

Even the delicately feline gossip of the older women had been blunted over the last few days, as Polly had demonstrated she was able to give quite as good as she got, and as fresher prey had joined the party. She’d even grown quite fond of some of them; to prove it she crossed to exchange a few civilities with her hostess who had just come in, a little late and flustered, a rueful, half-amused, half-exasperated look on her face.

“Trouble?” Polly enquired lightly. While she’d always assumed that her hostess was in blissful ignorance of the darker undercurrents of the house party she must be someone Mosley trusted implicitly to have been given that role in the first place, and in the current state of affairs any little thread which might unravel the mystery was worth pulling on.

Her hostess laughed. “Trouble for Cook, certainly. And so for me. Fortunately, she takes a pride in coping. But really!”

Her voice tailed off into a mutter, out of which Polly thought she could distinguish the words “So inconsiderate!”

Polly raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Her hostess shrugged.

“Oh, an elderly relative-by-marriage rang Oswald less than half an hour ago to inform him that she’s going to descend on us all for lunch. With her “secretrix”, too, whatever that’s supposed to mean, if anything more than that Lady Georgiana’s vocabulary is hopelessly stuck in the 90’s.”

Her hostess drew an evidently much needed breath, and added, in an acid purr, “Where, doubtless, she’d like us all to believe her complexion remains, too. Really! Two extra women, and the table hard enough to place as it is. And maybe her secretary would be happier lunching in the housekeeper’s room, after all? Oh, it’s so difficult with these working women, to guess whether she’s a real lady or not. And all Oswald will say is that his cousin is far too well-connected for anyone with political ambitions to dream of offending her, and that he’s sure I’ll cope admirably. As you’ll find when you have a household of your own to manage, my dear, men have absolutely no notion of the quandaries we women have to surmount daily.”

Polly blinked, trying to visualise a future in which the greatest peril facing her was organising dinner parties for Joe, and risking his springing two extra guests on her at the last minute. Somehow, however her imagination tried to spice up the prospect, it seemed to lack interest and excitement.

There was the noise of a car pulling up outside, and her hostess moved unobtrusively to the window. Polly drifted in her wake, noting from behind her hostess’s shoulder the ill-assorted couple descending from the back of the pre-Great War Rolls. The smaller figure, looking like a demented macaw in her feathered toque, bugle-beaded velvet opera jacket, and numerous wispy and vivid scarves deployed about her person, was shaking off, impatiently, the efforts of the taller figure in a tweed coat and skirt to assist her from the car. The hostess broke into a satisfied smile.

“I’ll just go and reassure Nellie. The dining room was absolutely right. I suppose I could have relied on Lady Georgiana. I should have had confidence that her - um - secretrix would be a lady, not just a young person.”

With that she fussed out of the room, leaving Polly staring in bafflement through the window, wondering what about the tall and bony outline, clad in dowdy tweeds, of Lady Georgiana’s “secretrix” could possibly have allowed her hostess to “place” her with such relentless accuracy. She shook her head, slowly. She would never, if she lived a million years, understand the British.

Then she smiled. The vast majority of them, certainly, were a mystery to her. But at least there was one of them she was quite sure about. Whatever surprises his countrymen might spring on her, Polly remained quietly confidently that she could read Joe like an open book written in the largest of large type.

The grin was still hovering about her lips when the pounding gong summoned her in to lunch. It lasted approximately 30 seconds. The secretrix turned her head to look up the table - mechanically Polly took in and inwardly shuddered at the horrors of her unquestionably home-coiffed bob - and then she recognised exactly where she had seen that prominent nose and those widely spaced eyes before.

It was an effort to make small talk to her neighbour as they were all seated and the staff began to dispense soup, she was so shaken with inner fury. At least, she thought savagely, it conclusively proved what - after a minute or so’s gut-wrenching fear in the dark, while eavesdropping upon Mosley, Fischer and Hanrahan from the broom closet - she had never really doubted. Joe was alive. 

Alive and - typically - interfering with her scoop. And - she almost choked on the clear, sherry-flavoured consommé - having the godawful, insensitive, crass, unspeakable cheek to drag that horse-faced, snooty bean-pole of an English typist into it for good measure. What could he possibly see in her?

“’That heart of fire the canopic alabaster shades, not quenches’.” The harsh caw, cutting across the light babble of lunch-time conversation, turned heads. “His pet name for me was Lady Salamander, you know. Dear Oscar! Such a tragedy!”

A lace-mittened hand was clasped, theatrically to the macaw’s bosom. Polly’s lunch companion - an affable, apparently ineffectual Captain in some regiment or other, who had been introduced under the name of Rothermere but who insisted on being addressed as “Bunny” - leaned over her, and hissed in an audible stage whisper, “After Oscar Wilde, was she? Explains a lot. Pity they didn’t bring her in as a witness at the trial. Cast iron plea in mitigation right there, what?”

Polly giggled dutifully, black murder in her heart.

“Now, going as Wilde, there’s a notion,” he continued conversationally. “Bound to be someone here with an astrakhan coat in mothballs - Lord Piddletrenthide looks the type don’tcha think? - add just a green carnation and - Voilà!”

He put his head on one side meditatively. “Green carnations rare as hen’s teeth in November, though there’s always crepe paper, I suppose. Maybe a hot-house lily? Or Cook might dig me out something suitable from the kitchen-garden -A passion à la Plato/For a bashful young potato -. What do you think?”

He looked across at her, with an absurdly puppyish air of unfettered enthusiasm, and (notwithstanding her unquenched fury at the outrage being perpetrated on her from the far end of the table) she almost laughed out loud. 

“I think I don’t have a clue what on earth you’re talking about,” she said. Bunny’s forehead crinkled, and then cleared as light dawned.

“You don’t? Oh, first visit, isn’t it? And until Mosley tipped us the wink in the billiard-room this morning, most of us thought it wasn’t happening either, this year - more Diana’s thing, you know, and with her being away - Pretty sporting of Mosley to carry on in the circs, what?”

“Carry on what?” Polly enquired, her curiosity now thoroughly engaged. Bunny looked rather like a magician producing his namesake from a silk hat.

“Grand Fancy Dress ball on Saturday. Masked affair; we unveil at midnight. Invitations going out this afternoon. Half the County’s invited.”

Polly’s jaw dropped. If she had thought the lunch had begun badly, it had suddenly got a whole lot worse. A full dress Ball? With half “the County” invited? That meant people like the Viscount and his sardonic uncle - not that his uncle would be likely to attend any such function, of course - he was hardly likely to give Mosley that sort of satisfaction, but the nephew - that was an entirely different kettle of fish, and he was bound to be somewhere in the neighborhood, being at loose ends after his unceremonious divorce from his college, and anyway, he had hinted as much and more at the Hunt Ball -

She started scrabbling at her napkin. “I have to go and phone - I literally do not have a single thing I can possibly wear - “

Bunny caught her forearm and firmly, but not ungently, forced her back down in her seat. “Nor does anyone. Half the fun. Improvise costumes from whatever you can beg, borrow or steal. Unwritten rule. More ingenuity, better everyone likes it.” He gestured extravagantly. “Last year we had this fearfully stuffy German - thought he’d never get into it - but Diana just said leave it to her, and right in the middle of the dance she rode in to the ballroom on his shoulders - wearing a tunic she’d knotted together from a couple of sheets - classical, you know -and with one of those kids’ toy bows slung across her back, and announced that they’d come as “Virgin on the Ridiculous”. Brought the house down.”

Polly wondered, privately, how the “fearfully stuffy” German had taken the reaction, but Bunny was chuntering blithely on.

“Anyway, on past years’ form Mosley will give house-guests the run of the dressing-up box soon enough. Bound to find something to suit you there. Amazing collection. Ought to be in the V&A by rights. Enough false beards and wigs in there to disguise an army, what?”

It was in that second, as his words sunk in, that Polly realised that she had put her hand upon the end of the thread that could lead her to the very heart of the labyrinth. For what better way to arrange a gathering of those who had best not be seen talking together than at an event where everyone would be masked, and no-one would question why?  
Her heart started to beat faster. It took no duplicity at all for her to assure Bunny that the Fancy Dress Ball sounded as though it would be the highlight of her stay, and that she could hardly wait until Friday.

Polly looked down the table and, recollecting, gritted her teeth. Always presuming, that was, that her cover hadn’t been irretrievably blown by Joe’s meddling by then, of course.  
She bent her thoughts towards how she could give his accomplice her marching orders, pronto.

After lunch gave her a chance. Her hostess caught her with an imploring glance, just as lunch was finishing, and she made her way over to find out what was up. 

“My dear,” her hostess murmured rapidly, “might I ask you an enormous favour?”

She nodded, wordlessly. Her hostess gestured.

“This is quite absurd, but Lady Georgiana has insisted on being taken round the picture collection - she says she knew the father of the current owner of the house well before the Great War, and apparently inspecting the portrait collection is essential ‘local colour’ for her memoirs - but from what Oswald says, I’m not sure I ought to let her -”

The older woman’s face, fascinatingly, was betraying a mix of emotions; rather like someone who was dying to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip, but who had a strong sense that she really mustn’t. Then, regrettably, it was evident that discretion had just triumphed. She coughed. “That is; the maids are always so enthusiastic with the polishing of the floors, and Lady Georgiana’s so frail, I’d never forgive myself if she slipped, and broke something, and me not there to watch over her - Could you possibly bear to come along with me? You could keep her secretary occupied, while I devote myself to her -I’ll be eternally in your debt - and the pictures are well worth seeing, and you haven’t had the full guided tour yet, have you -?”

There was, as Polly cynically acknowledged to herself, nothing a complaisant guest could possibly say but a polite acceptance, but equally fortunately there was nothing she could at that moment have wanted more than a chance to occupy Lady Georgiana’s secretary.

_With a few thoughts on exactly what’s likely to happen to her if she crosses my path again, for one thing._

It was merely a case of finding the right opportunity. As they trailed through the upper rooms and corridors of the great house, the dowdy secretary dutifully making shorthand notes in her spiral-bound notepad of the ever more implausible anecdotes spinning off from Lady Georgiana’s reaction to the various age-darkened oils , and responding uncomplainingly to increasingly demanding orders barked out at erratic intervals by the eccentric macaw, the only question Polly had was; how best to do it?  
And suddenly, abruptly, the decision was taken out of her hands. The secretary, summoned forward to assist with unlocking a cabinet of miniatures which Lady Georgiana (to her hostess’s evident, if unvoiced, concern) had demanded that she take a closer look at, put her notebook down on the Hepplewhite chair nearby. There was something a little too deliberate about her gesture as she did so. Under cover of moving forward to inspect more closely yet another “Horse, with Man” by Munnings, which hung above the chair, she glanced casually down at the pad.

Polly stiffened. The first half of the page lying open to her view was covered in a rapid, casual shorthand; the work of someone who wrote it day in, day out, expecting that no-one would ever have to decipher it but her.

The lower half was - to the trained eye - entirely different. The gruff-voiced, mustachioed woman under whose nightly verbal flayings Polly had managed to learn enough of the tools of her trade to win her escape from the stifling mid-Western town of her birth (funny she’d not thought of her for years, when she owed her so much) would have put it up on the board in a heart-beat as a textbook example of how Gregg outlines ought to be formed.

And the message was, accordingly, perfectly legible. To the trained eye.

“Beware ambushes. Don’t believe anything they tell you. Is there anything you need to tell us now? Can I carry any messages for you? Do you need help to escape?”

Polly snarled, inwardly. But the dowdy secretary had turned away. She looked up and down the Long Gallery for inspiration. And then - with a nod to Bunny’s lunchtime chatter - she found an inspiration, and ran with it.

“You couldn’t possibly lend me a pencil and a sheet of paper, could you?” she said, turning to Joe’s typist with an air of bonhomie that almost stuck in her throat. “I’ve seen a picture up there -“

She gestured in the direction of a massive oil in the high Victorian “history painting” tradition, which some long-dead RA had titled “Unloading the Wounded from the Bosphorus Lighters at Scutari”, and felt accordingly entitled to populate his multiple square feet of canvas with an Orientalist riot of fakirs, dervishes, beggars, lepers, eunuchs, spies for and against the Sublime Porte, and numerous other picturesque and exotic hangers-on, forming a vivid tapestry against which the corpse-pale skin, and solidly prosaic red white and blues of the soldiers’ uniforms showed as a banal island of primary colours, and against them in yet further contrast -

A precise, slight figure in a prim, dark front-buttoning dress half-covered by a starched apron, the white veil covering all of her hair except for the one, carefully controlled dark curl that escaped across her temple, stood an asymmetric three inches away from the dead centre of the canvas, drawing all eyes merely because of her stillness.

“I mean she’s the - Lady with the Lamp. So - um - special. And - well - I have to get a costume for a - um - fancy-dress party.” The macaw turned towards them; engaged; fully alive. Abruptly, she was conscious of her hostess flashing alarmed glances at her. Presumably Lady Georgiana was not numbered in the half of the County who'd been invited. With barely a beat, she added, “When I get back to NYC this winter. My Editor’s brother’s wife gives these parties, you know.”

The macaw looked at her with faint regret. Her hostess looked at her - with infinite gratitude. The dowdy secretary - averted her gaze, but nonetheless held out a virgin sheet of paper and a pencil. Still looking up at the exuberant canvas, Polly scribbled. It would be nothing like the elegance of the outlines she had just seen, but it would, she trusted, be unequivocal.

“Thank you. No problems. About to make breakthrough. No intervention required. Tell him: contact next week.”

As they were going down the stairs from the Long Gallery she almost slipped; let her purse and its contents spill across the stairs. The dowdy companion scurried to pick them up, handing them back to her, sliding her folded sheet of paper with its shorthand jotting among a wad of other papers. Polly felt no doubt at all that she had got the message.  
It had been a jagged-edged, unpleasant day, Polly concluded as she finally slid between the fine-drawn linen sheets of her four-poster bed close on midnight that night. Apart from the other annoyances, she seemed to have lost her dragon brooch some time that afternoon. She could almost have cried, though doubtless one of the maids would pick it up in the morning; it must have dropped off her coat somewhere today.

It was not that it was intrinsically valuable - it was a trinket which Joe had bought for her years ago in Shanghai (had he forgotten that, like he had the camera, she wondered?).  
Her mind wandered back to that humid day, when she'd dragged Joe shopping because she was still - despite her pose of sophistication - too frightened to venture into the old town alone, and risk what rumour said might wait for over-bold Western girls who wandered off the beaten track.

And the little old yellow man, wrinkled and sinister behind his wares in the curio shop in one of the alleys that ran up from the waterfront, would certainly have been too intimidating to tackle alone , no matter how much she'd fallen in love - at first sight - with the dragon brooch. When she'd asked, through Joe, if he would remove it from the display case for closer inspection, he'd pointed to her, and muttered excitably.

“What’s he saying?” she’d asked, and Joe had exchanged a few words of halting Cantonese with the shopkeeper, and then grinned.

“Just talking up the price,” he’d said. “All these blokes do. He says it’s specially lucky for you. He saw you looking at it, I expect.”

But that hadn’t satisfied her; nor the shopkeeper neither. He’d uttered another stream of gibberish, and a slight, somewhat effeminate-looking middle-aged Englishman who’d been poking through some rolled-up hangings on silk towards the back of the shop had unexpectedly interjected, “He didn’t just say it was lucky. He said; ‘it will call to you across the deep water, and snatch you from out of the talons of the eagle’. That’s quite some class of prophecy, I’d say. I'd buy it, if I were you.”

And she’d agreed, and after some half-laughing protest Joe had bought it for her - at what the little guy had been asking for it, since he hadn’t seemed inclined to bargain.

And now she’d lost it. And - despite the vague ideas squirreling around her head from the art gallery - she really didn’t have a clue how to get hold of a decent costume for the fancy-dress ball on Friday. Even if Joe’s frumpy typist hadn't probably comprehensively blown her cover already.

“Balls!” Polly hissed, uncharacteristically, virulently and satisfyingly into the dark of the bedroom.


	12. Polly starts to get an insight into the plot at last

“The word,” a low voice said from outside the library’s partly open window, “is ‘Tranby Croft’.”

Polly shrank further back into the book-lined alcove. It was unlikely that either of the two men standing on the gravelled terrace a few feet below would look up, but she was learning not to take chances.

“Understood.” Mosley’s secretary’s voice was unmistakable, at least; there was something just a little too studied about his cut-glass tones. Not, Polly had diagnosed, self-consciously adopting the local idiom, ‘quite - quite’. Or did the formal perfection of his intonation betray a foreign origin?

Whichever, he was yet another of those athletic young men she had begun to notice about the place; suspiciously well-muscled for their ostensible jobs, in hard physical condition, their hair-cuts and overall turnout just a little too smart, almost military in their precision. Once one added up the grooms, game-keepers, chauffeurs, handymen and the like which the estate appeared to require it came to a respectably sized body-guard: almost, one might think, the nucleus of a private army.

“I’ll ensure the - ah - appropriate people are informed,” the secretary continued. “And - ah - prepare the billiard room for the reception.”

“I’m sure we can rely on your efficiency, as always.” 

Polly had placed the other voice, now; and her pulse quickened with excitement. Here was someone she had not pegged as part of the Brethren; the egg-head young professor from Cambridge (Physics, was it, or Mathematics?) who’d arrived a couple of days ago and walked about the place with a secret sneer on his face, as though he had personally examined them all, and didn’t think any of them came up to his intellectual standards, including his host.

Stealthily, she gathered up her sheaf of notes. So far in her stay she had justified the hours spent in the library (this was not the first interesting snippet of conversation she had overheard drifting up from the terrace, which was a favourite spot for the men of the party to foregather for cigars and what, had they been female, would unquestionably have been described as ‘gossip’) by ‘research’ for a highly romanticised account of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 which she was preparing for one of the American periodicals. Mosley had wholeheartedly approved the notion, becoming, for him, almost garrulous.

“Fifty percent of people - more, probably - will reject any idea out of hand if they think it’s new. Even in your country, which prides itself on being go-ahead. But you’re more than halfway there provided only you can persuade the idiot public to believe your idea is the next logical step in an established tradition - better yet, is the true direction that tradition must take, shaking off heresies and false accretions of the centuries - look at Italy if you want a model, reinvigorating itself with notions of some supposed great Roman virtues which died out a century or more before Christ, and weren’t more than a few orators’ humbugs in the first place -”

He’d smiled at her; the cold, shark-like grin which never reached his eyes. “Go for it, Polly. Fire up the good clubwomen of Topeka and Little Rock with the romance of the ’45. Make them feel they’re Flora McDonald, escaping over the sea with the true heir to the throne disguised as her lady’s maid, but destined to come again from out of exile to sweep away the smug usurper and all his self-serving ministerial cabals, and set up a brighter, cleaner, truer realm in its place.”

For a fraction of a second something like genuine emotion flickered behind the mocking tone, and, looking back, Polly realised that was the moment when she first began to have a true inkling of the scope - asked honestly later, she would have said ‘the madness’ - of what these people intended. And what stakes they were playing for.

She took care that her departure from the library was unobserved, and she retreated back to her own room with the silent delicacy of a cat. Only once there did she allow herself a small gleam of triumph.

For after all, she had now been handed the key that would unlock her route into the Inner Circle.

“Tranby Croft,” she murmured to herself, to fix it firmly in her mind. “Tranby Croft.”

\----

Rothermere’s assertion that the Mosley dressing up box belonged, by rights, in the V&A was not, Polly decided, much of an exaggeration. The female half of the house-party, given first choice, descended on it like a flock of twittering birds, tossing garments this way and that, disappearing behind screens, bundles of clothes clutched protectively to their chests, emerging minutes later triumphant or disgruntled as the case might be.

She herself had already - given a few hours burning the midnight oil, and a lot of hard thought - laid her plans. Her hostess thought she was going as Florence Nightingale, did she? Well, let her. The more misdirection on that scope the better, and she had already taken the precaution of drawing the Scutari painting to the attention of that member of the house-party who came closest to her own height and build - a perpetually absent-minded young lady who answered to the name ‘Poppy’ for, Polly suspected, almost certainly discreditable reasons. Perhaps the seed would take.

Her own burrowings brought up pure gold. A long, severely plain brown stuff gown - a plaid shawl - a man’s wig of close-cropped red-gold curls, and a long blond one whose bleached artificiality was in the most eloquent of contrasts to her own natural fairness - and finally, most inspired of all, a black velvet knickerbocker suit, with a close fitted black jacket. Whether its long gone original owner had fancied himself as a Prince in the Tower, the defiant boy of _When Did You Last See Your Father_ or as Bunthorne mattered not a jot. She tried it on - it fitted - and, more to the point, the brown stuff gown could be dropped over it in a trice, allowing her to switch outfits almost at will. And shawl and fichu between them would surely cover the expanse of neck and breast that the gown’s cut would normally reveal.

Bundling her loot together in an old bedsheet to deter the curious, she retired to her room, called for white cotton and thread (she’d always been a fairly adept needlewoman, which had saved her bacon in the early, cash-strapped New York days, when she’d had to skip lunch and save car fares by walking even in the worst of weather in order to afford the frocks to be seen in, though - thank all the stars - she’d not had to practise in years ) and, not without a pang of regret, sacrificed a white lawn lace-trimmed nightie to create the fichu, a mob cap and a Fauntleroy collar.

Masks were easy; Mosley had arranged to have a selection delivered to the house by a London theatrical costumier, and invited his guests to help themselves. Polly, interpreting the instruction liberally, pocketed two and hoped there was a sufficient surplus in the collection for the theft to pass unnoticed. By 7.00pm when the dressing bell went for the house-guests to dress for dinner Polly was as confident as she possibly could be that all her preparations were made. It only remained for her to hold her nerve through what might easily prove the most perilous evening she had ever spent. 

Guests for the ball started to arrive at ten or so; first a trickle, then a flood, all announced by well-drilled footmen whose formal demeanour betrayed not a flicker of amusement at being required to announced the arriving guests as “Her Majesty, Marie Antoinette” “Monsewer Robspierre” “Mr Sherlock Holmes - and his Gigantic Hound” and a wide assortment of other improbable sobriquets.

Polly, stealing down the grand staircase from her room, having changed for the fancy-dress ball out of the oyster-satin bias-cut evening-dress in which she had endured the interminable stress of dinner, encountered Mosley on the stairs, unmistakable (despite the Stygian gloom which for Polly had become inextricably associated with the upper stories of the English country house) in the white-and-gold costume, topped with full periwig, of his Louis Quatorze costume. 

“So,” he purred, catching her round her waist (for a moment she feared he might detect the doubled layer of fabric, and the betraying thickness of the soft velvet beneath - and how she wished now she was dressed that this particular country house was like Charlie Cook’s: completely foreign to the delights of central heating). “And whom do I have the pleasure of accosting?”

It was quite obvious he knew exactly who she was; he wanted her to state her identity for the purposes of this evening, clearly. 

And she was prepared for this one. She bobbed a curtsey - awkward, unpractised, clumsy as a man in skirts. “Betty Burke, so it please your honour,” she muttered, in a hybrid, high-pitched accent. Mosley brayed a laugh.

“Well, give my very best respects to - ah - your mistress, then. And may I wish you a safe journey and a safe and most importantly - ah - an early return.”

He planted a kiss upon her cheek; chaste enough, but with an underlying hint that if time and circumstances were only to permit, well, then - things might change -  
Inwardly fuming, she watched him go on down the stairs ahead of her. And then, reluctantly, she smiled. A forefinger stole under the brown stuff cuff to surreptitiously stroke the black velvet concealed beneath it.

In this particular contest, indubitably, she had the upper hand. 

It took a surprisingly long time for Polly to detect anything untoward happening. She circulated through the ball, nodding on the one hand to a Pocahontas, on the other to Queen Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. Not without a certain amusement, she noticed a dark-clad figure, her hair covered by a demure white veil, lugging behind her an enormous hurricane lantern Polly suspected she had unearthed from somewhere in the stables.

“So,” she murmured, “the Lady with the Lamp did come to the ball.”

The ball was getting more crowded by the second and once again Polly found herself applauding the Brethren’s strategy; assuredly no outsider, however close a watch he might be keeping, would be able to follow a suspect through this. Eventually the ranks started to thin a little; prominent guests (a red-robed Cardinal Wolsey whose bulk and strong coarse features reminded Polly too strongly of Hanrahan for her to ignore the likeness, a Blondel - his harp slung across the back of his blue satin tabard - whom she had pegged as Mosley’s secretary from the first) were suddenly no longer visible.

It was time.

Her heart thumping, Polly stole quietly up the stairs to the nearest bathroom. She locked the door and unmasked. Then she paused, her hands gripping the rim of the washbasin for a few moments, taking deep breaths, getting herself under control. That achieved, she skinned rapidly out of the brown stuff gown, consigning it, the plaid shawl, the fichu and her old mask to a conveniently located laundry chest, and standing revealed - blissfully cool for the first time that evening, in her Lord Fauntleroy suit. She snatched off mob cap and red-gold wig together, thrusting them to the bottom of the chest. She gave her face, unmasked in the harsh light of the bathroom, a critical scrutiny in the looking glass. Her minimal makeup and the scraping back of her natural hair into a severe hairnet, to facilitate the rapid exchange of wigs, had stripped her features down to their essential lines; no disguise, no camouflage. Polly wasn’t entirely sure she liked the uncompromising person who stared back out of the looking glass at her. It was, in some respects, a hard face; one which betrayed single-mindedness in every lineament; the face of someone who could show an almost masculine ruthlessness in pursuit of her stated goals.

Uneasily, she wondered if others had ever seen her like that, too; the boys in High School, who’d openly gawped at her looks like a row of silly goldfish in class, but who somehow always found someone else to giggle and shriek with in the back row of the movies on Saturday night, or in the rows of cars parked under the trees, up by the lake, on the endless summer evenings. Perhaps even Joe - with his constant harping back to Nanjing, and that thrice-bedamned fuel-line, and his odd elusiveness over the months since their reconciliation on Totenkopf’s island - had seen it and been repelled too...

“Later, Perkins,” she admonished herself briskly. “Now you’ve got a job to do.”

From the chest’s recesses she extricated the little bag she had concealed there earlier in the day, and dropped the long blond wig over her head, arranging the artificial hair with a few deft strokes of a comb. The mask - black velvet to match the knickerbocker suit - was donned in half a second. She took a last glance at herself in the looking glass, her hand already on the handle of the bathroom door. 

Polly nodded, slowly, formally at her reflection, before ducking out into the passageway and down the stairs towards the billiard room.

“Room” was something of an understatement; a covered walkway lead from the main body of the house to a converted pinery which a previous owner, temperamentally inclined more towards gaming than gardening, had laid out with no less than four full sized tables, and an arrangement of little alcoves which offered every convenience by way of comfortable armchairs to rest between games, little mahogany tables with elaborate chess, draughts or back-gammon boards set into the veneer, or ingenious flaps which flipped down or pulled out to permit the odd hand of cards.

Polly had gambled on Mosley’s selection of the billiard room, which could undoubtedly hold a sizeable mob if put to it, and the careful distribution of the password in advance. Her guess was that the various members of the conspiracy not only didn’t know each other, but emphatically didn’t want to know each other, at least until they could tell that the conspiracy had been wholly successful. Deniability would be key at this stage of events - the ability to move among your neighbours and not risk betraying that you shared a dangerous secret with certain of them. Perhaps - she indulged a flight of fantasy - there was even the fear that it would be impossible to force the snobbish upper-class conspirators to work together if they knew enough to argue about their respective hierachies within the organisation. In any case, she had betted that she would not be asked to unmask as she passed through into the billiard room, nor would she be asked to give her name.

And so it proved. One of the anonymous, muscular young men, stationed at the entry to the billiard room, looked up as she stole in behind two backs which were blessedly unfamiliar to her, even under their heavy disguises as, respectively, Henry VIII and a swan. She muttered, in a self-consciously choked English accent, “Tranby Croft” and he nodded her through.

Her first reaction was shock, blended with massive disappointment and the fear of having made the most enormous idiot of herself. Green baize sheets had been draped over all four of the billiard tables, and chairs had been drawn up round them. There were roulette wheels on each table; piles of chips sitting ready on the baize and the guests who had arrived earlier placing their stakes and collecting their winnings with a sort of focussed intensity appropriate to hardened gamblers engaged in an evening’s play; a trifle illegal, possibly - not the kind of thing one might want to confess to the Lord Lieutenant or the MFH (though - who knew? - perhaps they might be placing their bets next to you, disguised as Rasputin, perhaps, or as the Red King. And that was, maybe, the whole thrill. For, Polly suddenly realised, conspirators as well as roulette players could have been initially ensnared by the twin cachets of social exclusivity and the thrill of the politely illegal).

Then she caught a glimpse of gold and white, flanked on one side by a solid block of scarlet and on the left by a slight figure in black, moving purposely through the throng. The chattering gamblers looked up from the table, and suddenly, without an overt signal, the roulette wheels ceased to spin. Her stomach landed back in its proper position. Yes: assuredly she had guessed right. This was not a mere upper-crust gambling fling. 

Mosley walked to the front of the room, and nodded towards the door. Two of the muscular young men leapt to fling the heavy doors shut. Heavy crimson plush curtains were already drawn, blocking any attempt to peer through the windows.

He tapped with a fork on the side of a wine glass for attention.“Ladies and gentlemen. We meet in secret today, that others than we may meet freely in the future. But the day of our future triumph is by no means a foregone conclusion. I ask you to risk everything; position, wealth, freedom - your very lives. And on the very slenderest of chances, too! What madness! What larks!”

His teeth flashed white in a broad grin beneath his superbly crafted papier-maché mask, splendid with gilt paint, and flamboyant with the white eagle’s feathers that bedecked it. Somewhat nervously, the masked revellers tittered in response. Mosley, sure now of their attention, allowed the lines of his mouth to become serious, almost stern.

“Nevertheless, I see no alternative to the desperate course we are all pledged to. No alternative, that is, unless you are all willing to lay your necks, and those of your children, under the yoke of the mindless tyranny which the world thinks of as ‘democracy’.” He turned towards them; his hands open. “If that is something you would be happy with, then by all means feel free to take your departure now. We shall not keep you.”

He paused, and gestured. His secretary, a sardonic grin hovering about his lips, moved towards the door, his hand hovering suggestively over the handle as though poised to fling it wide to accommodate an expected stampede. One or two of the guests looked nervously towards each other, and towards the unspoken invitation of the door, but no-one moved.

Mosley’s grin got wider, his head went right back; his voice acquired a deeper, more compelling note. “No-one? Does it mean, then, that carrying on as you have been carrying on - as it has never occurred to most of the people you have ever known not to carry on - strikes you as a fate only fit for fools and slaves; that you are prepared to take any chance, however slim, to win a better future for England; that you want the Empire to be something more than a name which does just as well for the picture palace where the little suburban typist goes to sit in the sixpenny seats to addle what passes for her brains with the latest pap from Hollywood?”

There was a subdued rumble of approval from the masked revellers; Mosley took it as assent, plainly. His fists rose high above his head in a clenched, prizefighter’s salute.  
“You are with me? Then I ask you to step forward; to laugh at risk, to dare anything and everything. For with enough will, we can triumph. More; we will triumph. We must triumph.”

There was a collective, indrawn, enraptured breath from his audience, and a cold shiver ran down Polly’s spine. For her, living as she had in the house with him the last few days, she felt all the cold falsity of his rhetoric. She would as soon have trusted an alligator.

But he had them now; they would follow him wherever he led.

His next words made it clear exactly where that would be. Polly had thought that she had become shock-proof; she had thought she had some inkling of where the Brethren’s plans were leading.

She had been wrong. Her wildest imaginings paled into nothingness before Mosley’s exposition. What he was describing - she gulped.

It would rock Britain to its foundations. Nothing like this had been seen since 1645 - the Glorious Revolution of 1688 , the Jacobite risings to which the Brethren self-consciously harked back seemed feeble, almost sophomoric efforts by comparison. Blood would flow in the streets. Race was to be set again race, religion against religion, worker against idler, man against woman. At every flashpoint which history, tradition, or evil ingenuity suggested there was a potential for strife riots would be stirred - stirred, too, by those whose duty lay with protecting the King’s peace and the safety of the realm. 

For those present in the room represented merely the tip of the iceberg. The tentacles of the conspiracy stretched deep into the Armed Forces, into the Police, into the county militias, to the Magistrates Bench. The disaffected men who had heard Mosley and his shadowy paymasters’ siren song would be diligent about all things when the balloon went up - except their proper duty. Reinforcements to stress points would - inexplicably - fail to arrive, blunder as to their proper destination, fire on the wrong targets. Only when the British middle classes, terrified in the face of apparently uncontrollable public anarchy, were crying out for strong leadership at any price would the second limb of the plot be revealed: a King would appear, indeed, from over the water, and, magically order would, under his guiding hand, start to be restored.

Success in the matter of Britain would send a clear signal to the sister conspiracies who waited in the wings; in the disaffected countries of continental Europe, still, after two decades, nursing the stings and humiliations of their Great War defeats, and into the heart of her own America.

If this enterprise succeeded, the democratic governments of the world could topple like dominoes before its impetus.

The sheer boldness of the concept staggered her. Her fingers itched to scribble it down; names, places, crucial officials suborned, infrastructure undermined. 

Yet something nagged at her. The New Jacobite Order might be swallowing this whole - indeed, it seemed they were far more prepared for this than she - already arranged into districts, it seemed, the leaders of which were being given their specific instructions in low voices by the muscular young men who were moving through the throng in the billiards room. But Polly’s instincts told her that even this outstandingly bold plot was incomplete; that even this cadre of the faithful was not being told everything.

So, there was a plot within a plot, and that if this bold design to shake the very fabric of Britain back to the original warp and woof could be seen as a square - a design in two dimensions - then the real plot might best be seen as a cube. And even Polly’s honed reporter’s instincts - which could sense the shape of the conspiracy within the conspiracy - failed to tell her its true nature. 

Nor was she any the wiser when Mosley, by the tapping of the fork on the wine-glass, intimated that the session was at an end, and the guests had best start making their unobtrusive way back to mingle with the rest of the guests.

She was almost back at the bathroom where she had concealed her Bonnie-Prince-Charlie-In-Disguise costume when two figures stepped out from an alcove in the corridor in front of her: Robespierre and Louis XIV in an improbable, anachronistic alliance. They dropped into step either side of her.

“We were beginning to get worried about you, Miss Perkins. Earlier this evening you seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.” Mosley’s voice betrayed nothing except entirely proper concern for one of his guests. “And I was so hoping to introduce you to a particular friend of mine.” He gestured towards Robespierre, who acknowledged his gesture with a chopped nod, but who maintained a resolute silence. Mosley opened a door and held it for her to pass through. Polly swept through with her head held high; bluff was her only hope now, and her hand was desperately thin.

Blondel got to his feet as they entered. Mosley, divesting himself of his mask, tossed it to him.

“Thank you, Erikson. As you can see, your observation about the shoes proved a correct one. Consider yourself highly commended.”

Erikson nodded. 

“Please be so good as to accept mine, also,” Robespierre said. "Mask and congratulations, both. Regrettably few men would have taken note of the remarkable - congruity - between Miss Burke’s footwear, and that of the noble Lord Fauntleroy, and still fewer would have had drawn the appropriate conclusions. Attention to detail is a wonderful thing, is it not, Miss Perkins?”

He stripped off his own mask, and handed it to the secretary with a flourish. His voice had betrayed him before, though, and it was without surprise she recognised the features she had glimpsed a few short days ago.

“Good evening, Dr Fischer,” she said carelessly, dropping her own mask and holding out her hand towards him, avoiding the temptation to glance down at the soft black kid dancing pumps which had betrayed her. “How delightful to meet you at last. I’ve heard - so little about you.”

Fischer raised her hand to his lips, and brushed the back of her hand. “My dear Miss Perkins! Your sang-froid is everything I could have hoped. May I ask Erikson to relieve you of that remarkably unattractive wig, while he's collecting our masks? After all, it has outgrown its original purpose, and I’m sure you’ll agree that there is a distinctly unappealing side to sailing under false colours?”

Still with that assumed carelessness she moved towards the mirror over the mantelpiece; discarded the Fauntleroy wig, pulled her own hair free of the confining net, and let it tumble about her shoulders. She held out her wig to Mosley’s secretary with all the disdain of the kitchen cat depositing a baby rabbit on the hearthrug, and forced a note of stinging contempt into her voice.

“False colours? That's harsh, surely: I figured I was an invited guest? Why else did you go out of your way to ensure I had the password, Sir Oswald; why, for that matter allow me to know what was happening this evening at all? You can hardly expect any of us to believe that you could be so careless with a secret as hot as this one? You can't surely expect me to believe you were dumb enough to let me find out all this - oh, and by all, I do mean all, not the abridged Ladies' Home Circle version you spouted to your puppets back in there?”

Mosley's face was suddenly the colour of whey; his voice a shadow of his formerly confident tones. "Erikson, thank you. That will be everything. Make sure my guests have everything they require. If need be, give them my excuses: I may be - detained - some time. Miss Perkins, can I offer you a drink?"

She accepted the brandy-and-soda he proffered as the secretary with a cool, silent efficiency gathered together his papers and left. 

Fischer turned towards her. "You have been busy, have you not? And - inquisitive. And perspicacious. I am honoured - as they say - to make your acquaintance. Miss Perkins."  
He gave a brief, chopped, from-the-neck bow. Mechanically, she lifted her hand to brush away the flecks of spittle which had spattered her from his brief self-introduction (his dental plate, she thought in a detached sort of way, could not be of the best quality, no matter the reputation German engineering had).

"The pleasure," she lied gamely, "is all mine. Anyway, isn't that true, Sir Oswald? You let me find out about everything, because you need me?"

His face, momentarily, was irresolute; he was squarely upon the horns of the dilemma on which she had placed him. Admit to incompetence, or tacitly accept her bluff that she was here not as an interloper, but with permission? He prevaricated.

"Need you? For what, precisely, Miss Perkins?"

She spread her hands slowly. "Because I'm the best reporter in the business. I can make the readers believe that black is white, Joseph Stalin's second cousin to the Archangel Gabriel and the Pope can be caught every Friday night at the Cotton Club playing sax with the boys. Oh, I can make them believe anything - provided I tell it right. It's all in the telling, isn't it, Sir Oswald? Because - why, we're two of a kind, aren't we? With us, it's all about the words. We'd neither of us be anything without them."

She gave him half a beat - no more - to digest that, and then went straight in with her next sally. If she could only string them along - keep them guessing - something, anything might happen - hell, they might even believe her. The adrenalin was flowing, and she was so strung up with her spiel that she almost felt she could have convinced herself.

"And, Sir Oswald, you're going to need the best. You don't realise just how much you're going to need a nice, friendly reporter to keep people sweet until you've settled yourself in. I don't believe you've a notion what you're risking stirring up, you know. If you don't want to find yourself strung up from some lamp-post one of these days, I suggest you start listening now, Sir Oswald. I've got something you need, and you can't get it anywhere else."

Yes - yes - it was working - there was a distinct shift in their body-language. They were listening - another few minutes, and she'd have them hooked - 

Polly pressed on. "You see, Sir Oswald, I know my readers. The good ladies of Topeka and Wichita and Madison - yes, the ones you were so keen I write the article for - won't find regicide easy to stomach, you know. Just because we don't want a king of our own doesn't mean we can't get remarkably sentimental about someone else's. You'll need to make quite, quite sure that the case against whomever you're planning to blame is completely watertight, and that they can't finger you for any carelessness, or neglect of duty in failing to save King George, you know. And I really, really don't think there's any force on earth that could dig you out of the pit they'll dig for you if they ever find out you've planned to murder the little princesses - yes, in their white organdie dresses and the pink satin bows in their hair, too -" 

The temperature of the room dropped, perceptibly.

Mosley almost sprang towards her, his arm caught by Fischer a split second before he slapped her. "You little bitch - how do you know -?"

Mosley stopped, awkwardly, at Fischer's savage gesture. She smiled; the slow, patronising smile which she had practised for years.

"Know? Why, Sir Oswald, you just told me yourself," she drawled.

His face was a dark purplish red with anger; veins stood out in his forehead. His hands worked as though he would like to break her neck on the spot. Involuntarily, and despite her resolve, she took half a step backwards. He gave a small gasp of triumph and pressed forward.

Once again, Dr Fischer restrained him.

"There is no need for - disorder," the little man chided. "Miss Perkins is - as I said earlier - ingenious. And, my dear, there is no harm - strictly between these four walls - of admitting the accuracy of her suppositions. She is not, after all, going to be a position to share them with anyone. After tonight."

He emitted a little giggle, which terrified Polly more than all the overt anger of the other man.

But she was not going to let him have the satisfaction of knowing he had frightened her, even if he killed her on the spot. Anyway, there were protocols to be gone through.

"My friends," she spat back defiantly," know exactly where I am."

He raised one eyebrow above those pince-nez. Behind the glass his eyes shone a pitiless blue. "Your friends? Such as, perhaps, Mr Sullivan? But how ill-informed you are, my dear. Our friends shot him down into the channel more than a week ago. You struggle - you cry out - you deny? Ach. It would be as one expected. But there is evidence, you know."  
Suddenly, brutally, he spun a photograph across the table. A hunk of misshapen metal, showing pale and blurred out under floodlights and an exposure mistimed. But the white lettering along the edge of the dark bulk in the middle of the picture told its own story - hll- and then a broken off bit that might have been a U, might have been an O.

"We pulled that out of the Channel. A fishing boat, Miss Perkins, caught it in her nets. At a depth of some fathoms, I might add. I should not be so sanguine, Miss Perkins, that Mr Sullivan is in a position to care intimately for your well-being."

His thin lips bared, and the small voice which she had always been aware of but which she had always forced to a deep hidden place within herself once she started to do daring work lifted its head and thought about giving tongue. And then he spoke, and the still small voice within her screamed on, and on unheeding; for the nightmare was suddenly upon her and inside her head - for even now she let no murmur escape to the outside world - she was crying out for help, and no-one was listening - and suddenly she was feeling weak at the knees, too - what had been in that brandy-and-soda?

Fischer smiled, a hard cold smile that did not reach his eyes, and he was catching her round her shoulders, and holding out a soft, foul-smelling pad towards her nose and mouth, and he was bending over her, crushing her obscenely against his chest, and saying, "You see, Miss Perkins, you have no friends. And a single woman without friends is so often a pathetic figure. You understand? But - we can find you friends. Oh yes, indeed. The purpose of the woman is for the recreation of the Warrior. You understand? Good. But, Miss Perkins, there is yet another reason why you are of interest to us. Why we desire to keep you alive."

Whatever the drug was on the pad against her lips was taking her; she could fight no longer against its languorous seductive pull. As it whirled her down into the warm and pressing dark; as she fought against that pressure, the last thing she was conscious of was Fischer's baby-clear skin and his piercing blue eyes behind the pince-nez.

And his voice, as he murmured, "Miss Perkins; understand this." He caught her chin forcibly and tipped it back at the precise moment when she was on the very edge of consciousness. " Miss Perkins: we will protect you. Even against yourself. Trust us. We will protect you because you are infinitely valuable to us. For the Master Race."

He paused; even now she could recognise the difference between mockery and truth. He was nothing but sincerity now.

"You are incalculably valuable, Miss Perkins. As breeding stock."


	13. Dex, returning to the Legion, must act fast to avoid death at sea

Joe's idea of the time needed to restore the Warhawk to combat readiness - based, so far as Dex could tell, on a mixture of blind optimism and his experience of repairs carried out by a fully equipped base not constrained either in the matter of personnel or spares by the need to remain strictly secret - had been out by a factor of five. It took them ten days to get the plane back up to scratch, and if the situation hadn't been so desperate he would have preferred another couple of days on top of that, to fine-tune the repairs, and implement a couple of mods that had occurred to him over the intervening period.

Not that Dex was precisely complaining, you understand. The days, it was true, had been filled with precision welding and the nice contrivance of solutions for problems which, in all justice, should never have been posed; and the politest way to describe the nights had been - restless.

Nevertheless, Dex was not, in any sense of the word, complaining. It was just that as he stood on the Liverpool dockside beside the towering bulk of the _Empress of Britain_ , a tourist class ticket in his pocket together with a set of documentation that proclaimed for the benefit of anyone who might be interested that he was one Michael Newnham, of Toronto in the Province of Ontario (profession: consulting engineer), that four days or so with nothing, really, to do except catch up on his sleep was not actually a wholly bad idea.

He dodged back as a burly manservant and a twittering nurse in veil and uniform passed in the direction of first class, respectively pushing and hovering over a frail figure in a wheel-chair, submerged to the point of invisibility beneath multiple rugs and wraps. "Sea air," hissed the nurse to no-one in particular as she passed. "Bound to work wonders. Poor dear."

Dex grinned politely, slid a sliver of gum between his lips, and contemplated the bulk of the liner towering above him. A blimp would have been faster, of course, but Davies's increasingly disconcerting reports over the last few days had convinced both him and Joe that the tentacles of the enemy conspiracy reached who knew where, and that travelling by air was both absurdly vulnerable and remarkably open to detection. And Dex had been lucky, too, in picking up an unexpectedly cancelled berth for the _Empress of Britain_ that very morning; he had expected to have to wait for a week or more. Joe, doubtless, reading his hasty wire from the dockside would be flabbergasted to learn how quickly he would be on the high seas. And, he thought happily, the sooner away, then the sooner he could return -

The _Empress_ \- the biggest and fastest thing the Canadians had ever put on the water, and the first liner in the world ever to innovate with ship to shore WT - would certainly be of technical interest during his passage. As she would to any consulting engineer (of Toronto) travelling on business for his European employers. Of course.

Dex shouldered his more precious luggage, indicated to a hovering porter what ought to be done with his cabin trunk, and headed aboard. On the upper decks a fancily dressed mob were, equipped with champagne and streamers, seeing their friends off across the Atlantic; it dimly crossed his mind to wonder whether any of the elegant shore visitors ever got left aboard when the whistle blew; the deferential stewards seemed hardly likely to be asking them awkward questions about tickets. Not, of course, that it was any business of his. 

Once in the security of his cabin (for those of a less sanguine disposition, disconcertingly far below the waterline), Dex kicked off his shoes, hoisted himself into his narrow berth (the upper one, thankfully, was empty also; evidently it had been a pair of travelling companions who had baulked at the last minute for whatever unknown reason, and the Canadian Pacific Line had failed to dispose of the other berth before sailing time), and was asleep long before the outline of the Liver Building had vanished behind the _Empress._

The coast of Ireland was dim off the port bow when he roused himself. The flickering lighthouses on the Antrim coast were beginning to wake to life. Remembering the comfortable ship-board convention that no-one was expect to dress for dinner on the first and last nights, he went in search of the dining saloon.  
Once fed, he took the opportunity to explore.

A turn or two down some intriguing passages in the deeper bowels of the ship he happened upon a small and scrawny crew-member (his sojourn in Glasgow allowed him to recognise that the undernourished waif appearance nevertheless meant that he was probably looking at someone who was nearing twenty and not - as size alone would have indicated - twelve) balanced precariously on a step-ladder doing something complex with an angle-grinder to a mess of ducting which joined and branched there.   
He gave an excitable squeak which sounded remarkably like, "Oo-er!" as Dex hove into view around the bend of the passage.

Dex, instantly grasping that any angle-grinding being done at sea less than six hours out from the Bar light-ship should in no sense of the phrase "ship-shape" be being carried out at all, and that at least the mechanic's job and probably everyone's up to and including the Chief Engineering Officer would be in jeopardy if it were to come to the ears of the directors of the Line, assumed the air of dumb ignorance proper to a passenger (at least, a passenger who was not, by profession a consulting engineer, of Toronto), smiled sunnily at the kid, muttered the first thing which came into his head (which sounded rather like, "Precautionary repairs, eh? Good job for getting down to them. Stitch in time and all that, I suppose?" - God, he must have been too long in Charlie's company!) and started to stroll nonchalantly past. The kid, giving vent to a barely-suppressed gasp of sheer relief, squeezed himself almost to invisibility against the bulkhead to allow his passage -

The judder of the ship's engines changed note - faltered - changed again. There was a sudden hard movement to starboard - Dex was flung against the bulkhead - he was conscious of the step-ladder collapsing - the kid being flung on top of him - a shower of sparks and the acrid smell of burning as the angle-grinder, still hitched to its power source, hit the deck - and then another smell; metallic, obscene, reaching straight to his back-brain with an atavistic force. Something warmly damp sprayed over him; he glanced down and saw a brightly tell-tale scarlet fountaining out from the kid's arm where the angle-grinder had caught him as it fell.

"Sir - oh sir - I'm that sorry -! Please don't -" keened the kid, still, mercifully in the first seconds of numbness before the pain set in.

Dex picked himself up from the decking. He had seen countless workshop accidents - though not many, he prided himself, in shops he'd had the supervising of - and spent months in a war-zone, to boot. He knew exactly what he was seeing; what he had to do.

Before the note in the kid's voice could change to the agonised wail Dex knew was coming he was whipping off his tie, fumbling in the breast pocket of his jacket for the Eversharp pencil which - thank God - never left him. His voice had a bark which came from somewhere he hadn't realised he possessed.

"Lift your arm. No - the right one. Right above your head. Hold still, you little idiot."

The kid gaped blankly - he seized the arm, and was dragging it into position, rolling up the flannel shirt-sleeve and applying the improvised tourniquet before even - he suspected - the kid's nerves had had a chance to tell him that they'd just been rudely severed. He twisted the pencil in the knot, applying a brutal force which made the kid's veins stand out in his forehead. Mercifully, the spouting blood died away under it.

"Right," he said brusquely, "Get moving. No. Don't waste your breath talking. Move. Now."

The kid, looking uncomprehendingly down at the wreckage which had, seconds before been his wrist, gulped; Dex hoped his grasp of anatomy wasn't adequate enough to allow him to recognise the rudely divorced ends of the tendon in the middle of that bloody mash. Before the kid could falter, Dex pressed ahead, frogmarching him ruthlessly down the corridor, looking desperately for help at every turn. No-one appeared. He was virtually carrying him before their journey ended.

At the first door marked "Private; Crew Only" he came to, he kicked thunderously once, and then again. The cabin door flew open - he half-stumbled over the raised threshold. It was some sort of recreation room apparently - there was a bare deal table with cards on it, and a swinging light, and bottles on a bar, and the blue smoke of numberless cigarettes. They must - he thought with a faint flicker of amusement - make a weird picture, scarlet blood covering them both.

"Surgeon - accident - angle-grinder," he snapped, adding, as a moment's afterthought, "artery."

Someone - thank God – bolted out, presumably to get help. Someone else took his burden off him and spread the kid out on the decking, someone who knew enough - the demand died unheard on his lips - to keep the injured limb uppermost and well above the heart. A third someone - a prince among men if not a haloed saint - thrust a tumbler into his hand, which a tentative sip revealed to contain a fine brandy. There were questions - conjectures - a buzz all around him. He answered them as best he could. He stuttered out his own in return. The sudden stop - change of direction - had, it appeared been caused by a steam drifter suddenly appearing under the bows of the liner out from behind the Bloody Foreland, and not showing his lights until the latest possible moment. Quarrel - waxing heated - about blind-drunk Killibegs skippers and their foibles; some of the people present appeared to think of them as a greater hazard to shipping than ice. Illustrative anecdotes of same, waxing incomprehensible. His head swam. Shock, a remote part of his brain told him dispassionately. He took another swig of the brandy.

Everything suddenly went deathly silent around him. He looked up to see a figure, resplendent in Navy blue, brass buttons and gold braid, looking down at him. He found himself being invited to come with him.

A moment's clarity of thought when he was passing his cabin door caused him to dig in his heels. Dex pointed out to his sheep-dog that it would make rather more sense if he met the Chief Engineering Officer (who it seemed had expressed an interest in seeing him at once) clad in clean clothes rather than ones with a patina of gore. This argument appeared to appeal forcibly to his escort; not only was he allowed to spend a few moments washing off the blood and changing, but when he emerged from the tiny washing area his clothes were already being gathered up by one of the stewards, with the assurance that they would be returned to him in, if anything, a better state than he had left them.  
When he finally arrived in the official cabin of the Chief Engineering Officer Dex was comfortably dressed, calm, and in a mood to take no bullshit from anyone.

The Chief Engineering Officer's cabin had a reassuringly business-like air about it; a large mahogany desk occupied most of the floor-space, and every available scrap of bulk-head was occupied by framed plans of the _Empress_ \- every deck, every cabin, each connecting door, every porthole outlined with precise detail. Dex itched to examine all of them. 

But the room's owner was already getting up from his chair behind the desk - coming round to extend a hand in a firm handshake. "Mr Newnham? The name's Simmons. Can I offer you a drink?"

Dex, slightly taken aback by the use of his alias - though heaven knew after the last month or so he shouldn't be bothered by anything anyone chose to call him - cast a quick glance over towards the desk. As he had half suspected, there was a passenger list sitting on it. So. The Chief Engineering Officer had evidently taken steps to make himself aware that Mr Michael Newnham was a consulting engineer. Of Toronto. Indeed. A small, tight knot of anger started to form deep within him.

_Trying to work out what I saw about incompetent maintenance on board, and what I might slip to the Company that could damage your standing, are you, Mister Simmons? Estimating your chances of a cover-up, are you? Drink with you? I'd as soon drink with a black widow spider._

He gestured an angry negative as Simmons moved towards a bottle and two tumblers sitting on a small round tray on the corner of the desk. It was only the fact that he was hardly in any position to kick off a huge, public row that kept him from making a more pungent comment. 

But the Chief Engineering Officer was continuing.

"You're sure? Anyway, I thought you might be wondering what's happening. To fill you in on the picture; I've just come from sickbay. Look's like McAuslan's not in any immediate danger - thanks to you - but the ship's doctor's got doubts about how much use we'll save of that hand. Fortunately, I discovered we had a Swiss surgeon travelling with us on this trip - man at the top of his field, European-wide eminence - and I took the liberty of asking if he minded taking a look - which he very generously didn't - they're working on him now -"

Slightly stunned, Dex sat down on the nearest available chair. So the passenger list hadn't been out to check up on him, but to allow the Chief Engineering Officer to scour for anyone with any relevant knowledge who might make a tiny fraction of difference to the kid's chances. And if he was prepared to stick his neck out to ask First-Class passengers those sort of favours - because presumably surgeons of Europe-wide reputation didn't travel tourist - then he was not planning on any sort of cover-up to the Line. Far from it, actually. Involuntarily, his lips relaxed. He looked across at Simmons, seeing him properly for the first time: round-faced, balding, clearly worried, but with the air of a man who would do his duty whatever it cost him. Salt of the earth.

"That's good to know," Dex said. He paused, doing mental penance for his ungenerous conclusion of moments ago. "Mind if I change my mind about that drink? But - uh - make it a small one, please. Your - uh - the crew have already been - uh - quite generous -"

Simmons' face crinkled in return. "I don't doubt. McAuslan's half-brother is my second radio-operator. Popular chap. Without that, doubt we'd have taken - well, anyway. Spilt milk. Anyway, I've a log entry to write up. If you don't mind helping me -? What did things look like to you, when it happened?"

The question was casually put, but Dex caught the slight, anxious undercurrent. No. This was not a man who would initiate a cover-up, or be anything less than generous to an injured man, but Dex could destroy him with a few words, nonetheless. A mere hint to his masters that he'd spotted what looked like routine maintenance being done on the hoof would kill his career stone-dead, and worse, probably. And it was, Dex thought, quite definitely bad practice, and whatever the explanations and excuses the man had - on the evidence of his demeanour generally, and looking at the rest of the ship, however he might with justice argue it was an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career - the purist should say "let justice be done, though the heavens fall". 

Perhaps, even, the Dex of three months ago might have been minded to say it.

_Let he who is without sin -_

"Very unlucky," he said promptly. "I mean; it was a flat calm, and the ladder was chocked, braced and perfectly steady. I guess it would have stood up to any normal conditions you thought might be on the cards - I've had some experience designing for on-board environments -"

(True enough, though his work on the _Albion_ and the rest of the Fortress-class was sufficiently heavily classified not to be likely to enter the public domain for a hundred years or more, when doubtless they'd all be living in bubble cities on Mars, and no-one would worry any more about oceans).

"The kid - I mean, McAuslan's - technique with the tools looked sound enough - I've trained enough apprentices, and I'd have taken the liberty of saying something if he'd looked like there were any dangers. He'd got the duct-work to brace himself against - he was working on one of the pipes, I think - didn't really notice which one - I take it someone had spotted a weak spot after we'd undocked -?"

He paused. Simmons didn't say yes, but he didn't say no, either. Dex smiled inwardly, and continued,"Anyway, that's all I can really remember. Suddenly we had this violent lurch and everything went everywhere. For a few seconds I thought we'd hit something. Hope it helps?"

It did, evidently. Simmons smiled at him, they exchanged further pleasantries, mainly concerning the ship's design, and Dex left.

He was back in his cabin and had been for some hours, fitfully dozing (his body, it seemed, had become annoyingly accustomed in a few short days both to broken sleep patterns and to not sleeping unaccompanied) when he was conscious of a noise at the door. In the morning he saw an envelope had been pushed underneath. He read it, raised his eyebrows, and read it again, an amused grin forming on his lips.

It would seem that Michael Newnham (consulting engineer, of Toronto) had been somewhat adopted by the crew of the _Empress of Britain_. And that they wondered if he might care to join them for drinks and cards at "the Pig and Whistle" (their slang, he gathered, for the mess-room he had broken into carrying their stricken crew-member) any time that might suit him after the second sitting (the less fashionable of the two) for dinner that evening. And throughout the rest of the passage.

Dex, who had not taken long to gather that his fellow passengers in Tourist Class were not of the most congenial, accepted with alacrity.


	14. Still no word from Polly

Helen looked down at the dragon brooch which curled around its tail in the centre of her palm, and glared up unblinking at her from small ruby eyes.

"So, what am I supposed to do with you now, then?"

Her voice was lowered in consideration of the other members of the house - who might find her talking to jewellery (and stolen jewellery at that, her conscience reminded her queasily) unduly disconcerting. Though to be frank, it was hardly as if there was anyone around to hear her, with Charlie and Rhys down at the far end of the stable block, alternately crowing with delight or being thrown into the depths of despair by how the new test assemblage delivered by Shuttleworths two days ago was performing under various stresses they chose to put it through, and with Joe off on one of his mysterious absences. It had been disconcerting finding Joe, whom she had regarded as an exotic bird of passage when she had met him in Glasgow, a semi-permanent resident of Charlie's house, rather as if one might be expected to share quarters with a unicorn with a bizarre penchant for bacon sandwiches. Nor had his tendency to slope off on unspecified "business" for days at a time, returning unshaven, demanding a bath, sunken-eyed with exhaustion, and pausing only to grab an hour or so's sleep before vanishing again, assisted to dispell the air of faintly awed alarm with which Helen regarded him.

The dragon maintained its own counsel.

Helen shook her head, thoughtfully. She had seen it first perched on the lapel of Polly's coat, sneering coolly down at the idiocies of the twittering lunch-party. And then, that evening, she had seen it again, blinking resentfully up at her from the depths of her Aunt Georgiana's handbag, through which (carefully instructed by family gossip and the housekeeper's nervously broad hints) she was taking one of her twice-daily precautionary rummages.

Why it was there was unquestionable; how Aunt Georgiana had brought it off - more intriguing. And why it was still here - more problematic still. And yet, although (especially after the brush-off the American girl had given her attempts to help) all she need really do - what she ought to have done the moment she saw that enigmatic ornament - was to package it up and forward it to Mosley's residence with a polite note to the housekeeper about its having been uaccountably become mixed up in her employer's trinket box, and a civil apology for any inconvenience Miss Perkins might be presumed to have suffered.

But a week or more had passed, and still Helen had kept it at the bottom of her little shell-box.

And today was the day she was going to do something about it. She had taken more than a week to come to a resolution, but with no word from Polly, and Charlie and Joe - when he was here - growing evidently (if tacitly) more twitchy by the day about that, it was high time she sorted things.

Here in her hand she had - as she had known all along, if she had had the nerve to admit it - the key to the whole problem.

Helen had her outdoor things on, the dragon brooch shrouded in her handkerchief, and was out of her room and onto the landing before, consciously, she was aware of having made up her mind. Had someone intercepted her on the stairs or in the yard she might still have failed in her resolution. It was just after dining room lunch, though, and the staff would be eating their own meal, or snatching a precious half-hour or so of leisure. She got to the little Baby Austin without interruption, and once she caught the roll of the open road in her rear-view mirror it would have taken wild tigers to stop her going through with it.

Within the hour she was in the housekeeper's room at Mosley's house, being plied with tea and shortbread, while with a breathy schoolgirl hesitancy she stuttered out an explanation about "only just having come across" and "inexplicable mix-up" and "might she restore her property to Miss Perkins with her personal apologies?"

The housekeeper received her barely coherent explanation with an unruffled demeanour and a soothing selection of reassuring platitudes that almost sent Helen into fits of semi-hysterical laughter. Was there, she wondered, a deeply secret manual in circulation among society hostesses and their most trusted servants which set out the foibles of possible houseguests, and standard operating procedures for dealing with them? "Lady G; kleptomaniac. Shake down all luggage thoroughly before departure. Lord F; Not Safe In Taxis. Ensure only travels in company with fully accredited battleaxe. The Earl of R: cheats at poker...."

The housekeeper's next words drove all considerations of levity far away. "But what a pity you missed Miss Perkins."

"Missed her?" 

The housekeeper nodded. "She had a telegram, Miss. Ooh - four days ago it must have been. While we were having the fancy dress ball. Oh, it was a shame you missed that, it was such an event. And the costumes! And the masks! Cook said you wouldn't have recognised your own brother if he'd been standing right next to you. Anyway, it seems Miss Perkins' newspaper wanted her back in America, on urgent business. One of the guests was travelling, also, so he drove her straight off to Liverpool the morning after the ball. They were gone before any of us were stirring; she didn't even have time to say goodbye. Though I will say, she left all the staff very friendly notes thanking us for looking after her while she was with us."

From the housekeeper's expression, Helen had little difficulty in deducing that at least some of said notes must have had "I promise to pay the bearer -" inscribed on them.Reading between the lines, it did not look good. Whatever the household staff might believe, it seemed that Polly had vanished into thin air days ago. And Helen found it difficult to believe that if Polly had left voluntarily she wouldn't, at the very least, have found the chance to tell Joe what she'd discovered to date.

"She had to go? Oh, dear." Artistically, she looked down in bewilderment at the dragon brooch, and then looked up as though just struck by inspiration.

"Surely, if she only left at the weekend she might not have got a berth yet? Perhaps if I send it express I can catch her at her hotel? Was she staying at the Adelphi?"

The housekeeper compressed her lips. "We did think she might have to wait. But apparently people have been cancelling berths all week. There was a report in the _News of the World_ that some old woman up in Yorkshire or somewhere predicted that something was going to happen at sea this month which would change the history of the Empire and determine the fate of kings. Folk are saying it could be a second _Lusitania_. Not that I believe any such stuff, of course."

The housekeeper eyed Helen sidelong, as if to accuse her of any different sentiments from robust scepticism in the face of superstitious nonsense.

Helen bit back her words. Whether she believed in prophecy or not, indeed world events were stirring - the company she had been keeping over the last few weeks had told her as much - and the war - when it came - might well start at sea. Anyone thinking to assault the British Empire would certainly have to deal with the Royal Navy, and why not sooner rather than later?

It would never do to appear too inquisitive, in case the housekeeper gossiped to someone who might be alert to anyone expressing curiosity about Polly's whereabouts.

"I hope that means she managed to travel by a good line. When my cousin went to New York with her husband last year they could only get berths on a French boat; just imagine!"

The housekeeper's expression told her that her hint of xenophobia had hit the right note. "Well, I know she did better than that. There wasn't a Cunarder leaving soon enough, but I think Sir Oswald said Miss Perkins had managed to do very well; a Canadian line, I believe, but all very modern."

Helen murmured something suitable about sending the brooch by registered airmail to Miss Perkins's office in New York, and turned the conversation, via the excellence of the shortbread, to a recipe Lady Georgiana had hoped she might obtain as she was going to be in the neighbourhood. A few minutes later Helen stood up, pulling on her gloves, having taken the housekeeper's discreet hint that, pleasant as the opportunity to sit and gossip might be, she had duties to be about.

"Well," she said, "I'd better be on my way. Thanks so much for the tea -"

Helen's immediate impulse had been to drive at the best speed the Baby Austen could command back to Cousin Charles's, and demand that they begin an immediate investigation as to which Canadian liners had sailed for North America in the relevant time period, and establish whether Polly had, in truth, been a passenger on any of them. But a subtle sense of something wrong had been twanging at her nerves ever since she'd driven out through Mosley's park gates. Its influence caused her almost without conscious thought to swing decisively left at the next major road, taking the route she would have taken had she indeed still been - as she had unblushingly pretended - in Lady Georgiana's employment, and travelling further away from her cousin's house.

It was a road which Chesterton would have delighted in; winding through coppices and between tall hedges apparently for the pure pleasure of it; cresting little ridges, and descending into dips and hollows roofed by intertwined branches from the trees that lined it, which no doubt became dark green tunnels when the leaves were thick in mid-summer.

Helen, who had maintained a moderate, almost dawdling pace, had once or twice on the crest of a hill caught glimpses in her rear view mirror which served, if anything, to increase her nervousness.

The pace of her breathing speeded up. Although the Baby Austin's engine was not of the quietest she fancied she could hear her heart thudding; she could certainly feel it.  
It occurred to her that the road, however picturesque, was very deserted; she had passed no-one since a farm cart four miles back, and nothing coming in the other direction since a District Nurse, puffing past her on a bicycle, had spared her a cheerful wave.

With a prickling of her conscience it occurred to her that she had omitted, in the speed of her departure that morning, to carry out the exhaustive series of checks on the Baby Austin which her father had impressed upon her (when her steady persistence had worn down her father's mild aversion and her mother's outright opposition to her being taught to drive at all) were essential if a car were not inevitably to break down irretrievably. Her ear cocked for the sounds of the Baby Austin's engine, and tried to gauge whether it sounded as it usually did, or was labouring under incipient mechanical breakdown. The more she listened, the less natural did the engine's note sound. But was it that she had never listened this closely to it before, or was there really something wrong? This really would be a very lonely stretch of the road on which to break down, and the short winter day was already drawing towards dusk. And - Helen cast a nervous glance into her rear-view mirror again - she was now certain that she was being followed. A motorcyclist, whose powerful machine could certainly have overtaken hers, especially at the modest speed at which she was driving the Austin, was always at the same distance on the few glimpses she had caught of him.

The few scattered, ill-built cottages which began to denote the outskirts of a village struck her as having all the charms of Venice, Alexandria, Tashkent or any of the fabled remote cities of the world she had dreamt since childhood of exploring. Surely now she had reached 20th century civilisation the peril that she had felt lurking behind her on the open road must dissipate like so much smoke?

Aat the back of her mind came the answering thought, "Suppose it doesn't. Was it like this for Polly?" If her suspicions were right, the people she was up against had vanished one woman already.

Her hands on the wheel were trembling. She stopped the car in front of the village shop, and went in. There was a white-haired old lady sat knitting behind the counter, and, Helen spotted with enormous relief, the paraphrenalia in one corner of the shop denoted it also did duty as the village post-office. 

"Hello! I wonder if I could send an urgent telegram?"

The woman behind the counter looked up, her face uncomprehending. "Sorry, Miss? What was that you were saying? Didn't quite catch." Her voice had the toneless lack of variety of the profoundly deaf.

Despairingly, Helen raised her voice, enunciating clearly and slowly. "I was just wondering -"

There was a harsh jangle as the door behind her opened and closed again. She half turned, to see a man in a long trench coat, with motorist's goggles and gauntlets, entering behind her. He made a polite gesture, inviting her to go on.

Helen gritted her teeth. If he were her pursuer, her plan of sending a telegram to invoke Charles's help would immediately alert him that she knew she was being pursued, and that would be tantamount to her confessing that her visit to Mosley's housekeeper had been no more than snooping. Sexton Blake and pulp novels of a like type had been a craze at school; she knew exactly what she might expect from the villains if she betrayed her knowledge. Bluff was the only answer.

Abandoning unborn any thoughts of enlisting the shopkeeper in her defence, she bought a penny bar of Fry's chocolate, and made her way back to the car. As she let in the clutch and pulled smoothly away from the kerb she could see the stranger emerging from the shop door.

Helen gritted her teeth. Where to go? If he continued to follow her - and he had been persistent enough so far - she had to assume he had learned enough from the housekeeper to know that she had claimed to be on an errand at least nominally on behalf of Lady Georgiana. If she failed to return to Lady Georgiana's house - if she betrayed the fact that she was no longer employed by that eccentric and bitter old lady - then not only her own fate but very probably that of Polly's would be sealed. But her break with Lady Georgiana had been acrimonious and final, as her need to give her relative a sufficient excuse to dispense with her services had shaded, as Helen's natural honesty and temper came to the fore, into a scathing denunciation of Aunt Georgiana's selfishness, capriciousness, tyranny and overall sheer silliness. Furthermore, even if she were willing to listen - even if Helen could convince her of the genuineness of the danger (and she knew enough by now of her character to realise she would not readily give any credence to a romantic story of which she was not herself the heroine) who was to say where Aunt Georgiana's sympathies would lie? Helen had heard her express enthusiasm for Mussolini often enough, and she certainly despised what she was pleased to call "the unwashed multitudes".

There was, however, one slender hope. It was not yet half-past three. It was Lady Georgiana's habit, when she was alone (and her uncertain temper had got rid of many of those friends of her youth that increasing age had not) to spend the hours from 2 to 5 ostensibly resting in her room, but in fact reading salacious French novels and sipping Madeira. If Helen could slip in unnoticed - persuade the servants not to reveal her presence -

Fate favoured her. As she drove under the arch into the old stable-yard Lucas was bent over the Rolls, tinkering with something under its bonnet and whistling. He looked up at the sound of the Austin Seven's engine, and Helen pulled over to park next to the Rolls.

Lucas opened her door before she had a chance to do so herself. He had a broad grin on his face, but he cast a quick look up at the upper stories of the house, though as Lady Georgiana's room looked forwards and had the heaviest of green plush curtains across the windows at any time when daylight might otherwise dare to creep in, Helen was not in particular apprehension of danger from that direction.

"Pleased to see you, Miss," he said. "But I'm not sure I can say the Mistress would be of the same mind. She's still very bitter about the things she says you said to her - was it true you called her -?"

"Probably," Helen said abstractedly, making a sshing gesture at him. He looked surprised, and faintly put out. The roar of the motorcycle engine she thought for a second had only been the product of an overstretched imagination grew louder.

The motorcycle and rider swept round the corner into the stable yard, put down his right heel, hard, and came to a slithering, curving halt - it occurred to Helen to wonder if he had trained as a speedway rider, or was merely indifferent to the cost of boot-leather. It had its effect on Lucas, however; he looked frankly impressed.

The cyclist pushed up his goggles and smiled at her - he was, as she had never doubted, the man from the shop. His voice was without any pronounced accent, but betrayed he was also not what her mother would have called, "out of the top drawer".

"You left these on the counter at the shop, Miss. I'm glad I managed to catch up with you so I could return them to you."

And he held out to Helen her driving gloves. 

She took them, inwardly cursing her stupidity at leaving them (though doubtless he would have found some other excuse), muttering vague thanks. 

"Can you put me on the right road?" he added. "I need to be heading towards Rugby, and I think I may have missed my way at the village."

Lucas started to direct him. Helen, trusting to his shrewdness and inherent loyalty - she had endeared herself to him within the first twelve hours of arriving in Aunt Georgiana's employ by asserting gently but firmly that not even a mechanical genius could be expected to keep an antique like the Rolls running without an occasional pause for necessary repairs, and that chauffeurs, like their cars, also deserved opportunities to refuel on the road - smiled sweetly.

"Lucas, has Cook got the kettle on? I'm absolutely parched." She turned towards the motorcyclist. "Thank you so much for your trouble about the gloves. I would offer you a cup of tea, but I'm afraid I daren't risk disturbing my aunt during her quiet time. It would be more than my job is worth." 

She turned, and went in through the kitchen door as though she owned the place.

Cook was sitting at the kitchen table, and looked up as Helen came in. "Miss Helen! What the -?"

Helen put her finger to her lips. "Please," she murmured, "don't disturb Lady Georgiana. She doesn't know I'm here."

"Doesn't know? But Miss Helen -"

Helen raised her hand again, just as Lucas entered from the stable-yard outside.

"Has he gone?" she demanded. Lucas nodded.

"Yes, Miss. And he didn't get anything out of me, neither. But what's going on?"

 

"I'm not sure," she said. "I just got the idea he'd been following me. Not just from the village , I mean, but for much longer. Here was the only place I dared turn in."

Cook, whose idea of ultimate heaven was the account of a really gory trunk murder to devour with her afternoon pot of tea, pursed her lips and nodded with the grave air of one who is shocked, but not surprised."White slavers, I wouldn't be at all surprised." She drew in her breath with a satisfied hiss that came close to lip-smacking. "No young woman today is safe!"

Helen, who had heard too much from her mother on the subject of her own scanty allocation of youthful charms, was somewhat inclined to point out that some young women, however, were less at risk than others. However, with policy in mind, she said instead, "Well, I'm not sure about that. But even so, I'd be glad if I could telephone my cousin, and ask him to send someone to take me home." She caught Cook's doubtful glance and added hurriedly, "Reverse charges, of course. Look, can you hide the Austin from Lady G. until someone picks it up tomorrow, Lucas?"

Both of them nodded, slowly. "But place your call now, Miss Helen. Her Ladyship will be down shortly, and we wouldn't like -"

Cook gave a tremulous glance towards the staircase, which Helen - who, after all, had to work for her living also - had no difficulty in interpreting. They would protect her to the best of their ability, true, but if the mad tyrant who ruled their destiny caught them at it then they would be out in the street, thrown to the winds of heaven without quarter.  
And that would hardly be fair.

"I'll be quick," she promised, "and after that, put me in the scullery, and I'll peel you some potatoes until Cousin Charles's man gets here."

Cook was indignant at the suggestion that Helen should occupy herself in such a way. However, a quick call later - her cousin, she reflected with relief, having an admirable facility for grasping essentials in short order - she did indeed retreat to the scullery, which, while malodorous, was the part of the house least likely to be invaded by Aunt Georgiana.  
Cook had thoughtfully left a few of her most treasured newspapers there, and Helen spent an instructive three-quarters of an hour brushing up on her knowledge of white slavers, and trunk murderers, and why no young woman these days could possibly imagine herself to be safe. They were not the sort of newspapers which Mummy had ever allowed into the house at home (Helen briefly wondered whether that might be a factor in their own heavy staff turnover, even compared to that under Lady Georgiana's insane exactions). She delved into accounts of raids on London night clubs, and felt herself much better informed, albeit a trifle baffled, about male depravity in its more ingenious branches.

The sound of an engine outside cut short her vicarious wallow into the seamier side of life. Cook, looking strangely flustered, appeared in the scullery, hustling her out, urging her to hurry up, and on no account to make any more noise than she could help; her Ladyship was, from the sound of it, up from her nap, and clearly on the prowl.There was a butcher's van drawn up at the back door. Helen's surprise at its appearance there at that time of day was tempered by her recollection that the local tradesmen were browbeaten into appearing at the house at whatever time Lady Georgiana summoned them. She wondered, idly, whether the butcher had finally come round to give her relative a piece of his mind about Lady Georgiana's apparently fixed belief that if Cook only used a modicum of diligence she could find boneless joints aplenty.

Cook pushed her in the small of the back, propelling her towards the van, and then, at the sounds of a shout from indoors, vanished back inside. The back doors of the van suddenly swung open. She suppressed a gasp as her cousin grinned up at her. Rhys, in white overalls artistically spattered with gore, turned round from the driver's seat. Lucas came out from behind the other side of the van, his grin as broad as her cousin's.

Helen found herself gawping; she couldn't help it. "What -? " she began.

Her cousin swung himself round to face her, awkwardly because of his leg, so that he was sitting on the edge of the van. "Don't make it too loud, Helen," he said. "If Lady G. finds out I'm trespassing on her premises disguised as a leg of mutton she'll cut me off without a shilling." His expression showed that he did not regard the threat as a particularly intimidating one, which was reinforced by his adding, "Would that make it the forty-third time or the forty-fourth, I wonder? Lucas!"

Lady Georgiana's chauffeur stepped closer in the dusk, and Helen heard paper crackle pleasantly. "Thank you, sir." 

Lucas's voice sounded impressed. Her cousin's voice was brusquely businesslike.

"You earned it, man. Both you and Cook did. And if Lady G were to find out and cut up rough; well, you know where to come, don't you? I'll see you don't lose by it."  
Lucas nodded. And then there was a noise from the house - she could detect the high-pitched screech of Aunt Georgiana, and Cook murmuring something in response. Charles unceremoniously hoisted her aboard, wriggled round, and pulled the doors to behind her.

"Get going!" he instructed Rhys. As the van lurched out of Aunt Georgiana's gates Helen let out a deep shuddering breath of relief. Her cousin pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket, and inspected her by the light of its flame. 

"Good girl," he said approvingly, having evidently established to his satisfaction that she was not about to collapse in a fit of the vapours. And then, conversationally, "Can you shoot?"

"Shoot?" 

By way of answer he unearthed a long, canvas-wrapped parcel from somewhere in the interior of the van.

"Thought it best to be prepared," he said. "After all, the most likely explanation is that the bloke on the motorcycle was just doing a bit of checking to make sure your story tallied. If he'd really suspected you, he'd have scragged you on the road, not risked you getting anywhere you could 'phone. But if they think to call Aunt G as an extra precaution, to see if you really do still work for her - well - we've got a long way to go before we get to Liverpool, and from what Franky's chap seems to have ferreted out, the Ungodly seem to have a heck of a pull with the forces of law and order. Hence, of course, the incognito."

He gestured to indicate the butcher's van.

"Yes," Helen said, suddenly struck. "Where did this come from?"

Her cousin coughed repressively.

"I found it, Miss," Rhys said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead.

"Oh." She thought it was better to change the subject. "You brought a gun?"

Charles shrugged. "Several, actually. After all: I've got them handy, and one never knows...Anyway, you haven't answered my question. Can you shoot?"

"Well -" She thought for a moment. "I used to bribe the gardener's boy with shillings to take me after rabbits, when I was at school."

Charles laughed out loud. "Good girl!" He pulled the twelve-bore out of its canvas package. "If you're familiar with shotguns, you'd better take this. I'll keep the service revolver and the rifle. Now, if you're used to rabbits, there's a couple of things that are different when you start shooting men instead. The first thing is that men are bigger, so you're more likely to hit something, and the second thing is that men are more likely than rabbits to shoot back...That's why you need to be quick about it, once you decide to fire."

His matter-of-factness almost took her breath away. "You can't mean that I might have to -"

He swung to face her - even in the dark of the van, illuminated only by the flickering street-lights of the town through which Rhys was taking them his face looked wholly serious, his eyes intent. "Helen; answer me this. Have you seriously doubted, since you saw that man in your rear-view mirror this afternoon, that England is at this very moment at war?"


	15. Britain - even if it doesn't know it - is at war, and politics make strange bedfellows

Helen cast her mind back, thinking frantically. But all she could find, in whatever depths of her mind she sifted, was recognition. Her cousin had only crystallised the fear that had been haunting her all day, not generated it from thin air. She nodded, slowly. "Yes. But it was - it was earlier than that I realised it, actually. Since the housekeeper told me about Polly - oh, do you think she's really at sea, or have they simply - ?"

Infuriatingly, she found herself unable to finish the sentence. Charles patted her, somewhat awkwardly, on the shoulder. "Well, that's what we're going to Liverpool to find out."

"Liverpool! But we can't go all that way in the back of a butcher's van" Especially one that we've -" she caught the edge of incipient disapproval emanating from the back of Rhys's head, and amended, hastily. "Only borrowed."

Her cousin's voice sounded amused; almost relieved. "No, of course not. We did a bit of telegraphing and 'phoning on our own account before haring off after you. If our messages got through we'll have a change of transport, by and by. Not that I can offer you anything very luxurious."

She nodded her head. "Not a problem. I'll be glad to take what we can get. After all, you're right: it is war."

"That being so, sir," Rhys interjected abruptly from the driver's seat, "you know what I told you. You ought to let me come along with you, sir. Permission to fight alongside you, in the last ditch if need be, sir."

Her cousin's voice was rough. "And the last ditch is exactly where I'm posting you, Rhys. If this fails - if we don't stop them now - England will be occupied territory. And before the year's out. But occupied doesn't mean defeated. You saw guerilla warfare on the veldt; you've a brain in your head: you'll be worth a hundred men if - God forbid - it ever comes to the Shires. I can't afford the luxury of taking you with me, so there's no point in talking about it. Take the post you're assigned, and don't complain, Sergeant."

"I've never been one to complain," Rhys muttered. "Sir."

Charles gave a compressed, tight nod, and turned again to Helen. "You too. This is war, make no mistake about it. If you do have to use that -" he nodded towards the gun which was now lying across her lap, "don't waste time reflecting that 'he, too, is some mother's son'. It's true, of course - it always is - but - save it for later."

Having exhausted his emotion, he turned his head away. Although they were slumped awkwardly against each other, and the motion of the van down the twisty roads threw them together more and more,it was clear he was in no mood to talk, and Helen let him be. The butcher's van rushed on under Rhys's sure direction into the December night.

Helen had not precisely begun to doze - dark as it was, it was still not yet late - but been lulled into semi-hypnotised stupor by the jolting of the van by the time they came to a halt at last. Rhys hopped out of the driver's seat and came round to the back of the van to release them. The van was parked on an expanse of muddy gravel outside a corrugated iron shed which - from the number of goods vehicles parked around it - seemed to do duty as cafe and rest stop for all the commercial traffic of the Midlands.

Helen became aware that the mechanic who had been peering under the raised bonnet of the lorry next to them was now turning, alert and wary, to scrutinise them. She clutched at the twelve-bore, and started to bring it up to her shoulder. With an almost insolent nonchalance the man acknowledged the threat of her weapon, and raised his hands above shoulder level, staring levelly back at her above the wavering gun barrel. 

"Good grief, Helen, you look amazingly like Franky in this light," he drawled. She gulped, in sheer shock.

"She most certainly doesn't, Sullivan," Franky's brother interjected.

Joe paused, almost as though taken aback, and then grinned. "Whatever you say, Charlie. But I'm not planning to stand in your light, if that's what's bugging you."

Her cousin snorted. Tremulously, Helen lowered the gun. "I'm awfully sorry, Joe," she said, "I just wasn't sure -"

He gave her a quick, reassuring shake of the head. "No offence taken. As things are, I'd rather you were overly suspicious than too trusting. Especially since - Look, what is the story about Polly? Charlie's message just said 'Bad news'. How bad?"

Helen hesitated, wanting to pick her words carefully. It occurred to her that she had never been sure exactly how things stood between Joe and the glamorous American. "Well, according to the house-keeper she caught a boat to the States, from Liverpool, two or three days ago. But -"

Joe nodded; the light which spilled from the café's windows showed his expression to be grimly watchful. "If she has, why not let us know? Unless she thinks she's got a scoop and she's keeping it to herself - that'd be insane in the circumstances but just possible - for her." 

"Well, I might believe that apart from this other thing," Charlie interjected. "Mosley's crew weren't at all keen to have anyone enquiring too closely about where she'd got to." And he retailed Helen's adventure with the man on the motorbike, with some passing compliments on her cool head and quick thinking that made Helen glad that the dark was hiding her blushes. Joe looked grimmer as the tale went on.

"Well, that tells us one thing. These gentlemen don't like their affairs being sniffed around. Good thinking of you to have a story which checked out so neatly. Otherwise it'd be two missing women we'd have on our hands rather than one - I don't suppose you managed to get the name of the boat Polly's supposed to have sailed on, did you, Helen?"

She shook her head. "I didn't dare seem too nosy. But the housekeeper said it was a Canadian line, and very modern -"

"Canadian!" Joe expression of surprise seemed, Helen thought, barely warranted by the triviality of the information. His hand went towards the breast pocket of his coat, but he appeared to change his mind in mid-movement, withdrawing his hand empty. "Well, that narrows the field a good bit, anyway. First thing tomorrow, Helen, you hit the shipping offices for the Canadian lines, and see if you can get passenger lists. If we find out that Polly - or someone purporting to be her - is on board, we need to intercept her before that ship docks, otherwise she could get whisked off anywhere. It's a big place, America."

"And how do you propose to manage that?" Charlie demanded sceptically. "Even you can't be planning a mid-Atlantic hold-up of an ocean liner with a Warhawk."

Joe, Helen thought, looked for a moment almost shifty. But all he said was, "First catch our rabbit. Once we know what boat it is - or if there's a boat at all - we can choose our strategy. Anyway, we can't stand here chatting, we're beginning to look conspicuous. Chris!"

At his shout a second man, in canvas overalls, cloth cap and muffler came round from the back of the lorry.

"Helen, Charlie; can I introduce you to Comrade Sugden? Chris; Helen Adamson, Charlie Cook."

"The lass'd best be changing into something she can travel in," the stranger observed. "The back of van's still over engine oil from that last load, and there's no call for her to spoil a good skirt."

Helen glanced down at the respectable-but-dowdy tweeds she had donned on rising, back in another lifetime. "I suppose I -" she was beginning, when Joe interrupted.

"Good point, Chris. Also, I'd rather not have to explain to some inquisitive copper what we're doing with a young lady in the cab. Filthy minds some of these blokes have."

"Not without cause, in your case," Charlie muttered. Joe spread his hands.

"Not any more. I'm a reformed character."

Charlie snorted. "Don't tell me you're claiming to have been redeemed by the love of a good woman?"

Even in the dreadful light Helen could see Joe was looking somewhat self-conscious. "Hardly - and anyway, like I said, we don't have time to stand here gabbing. Helen; I think I've got just the thing for you in the cab." He scrambled up, and tossed a bundle of fabric down to her. "Here. Change in the back of the lorry."

The interior of the lorry was dark, and empty, though it indeed smelt strongly of machine oil. Helen retreated modestly towards the back, and investigated the bundle Joe had given her, which proved it to contain heavy blue denim overalls and a blue fisherman's guernsey. The overalls' owner couldn't have been a particularly tall man, fortunately; she only had to roll the bottoms up an inch or so. She rolled her skirt and coat into a bundle and jumped down from the tail of the lorry.

Rhys had gone; she devoutly hoped to return the butcher's van from wherever he had purloined it. Joe looked approvingly at the transformation.

"Here, you ought to be able to cover all your hair with this," he said proffering her a flat man's cap. "Thank god you wear it short."He added a wool muffler. "Oh, and try putting this round the lower part of your face. It won't stand up to close scrunity, but at least you've a sporting chance of passing as our apprentice if any cop gives the lorry a routine check. Try and keep in shadow so far as possible, and if you have to say anything, an adenoidal whine would be just the ticket."

"And what about me?" Charlie demanded. Joe looked ruefully at him. 

"Sorry, old man, but we're just going to put you in the back, and hope for the best. I can't see overalls and a flat cap making a blind bit of difference; whatever we dress you in isn't really going to stop you looking like exactly what you are."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Charlie demanded. It was the man addressed as Chris who responded.

"Officer class. Eton and Oxford. Pillar of the community. On the bench. Ardent preserver of pheasants, class privilege and capitalist system. That about it, Mr Cook?"

Helen's jaw dropped; she had no idea how her cousin was likely to respond. Actuallly, after looking non-plussed for a moment, he grinned.

"Harrow, actually. But the rest of it was about there. So I take it you're one of these Red revolutionaries? We had one of them in my Squadron in China. Best mechanic I ever had. So how come you ended up going in to the delivery business with Joe? Press gang? And what are you two delivering, anyway?"

"Contrary opinions," Joe said. "Comrade Sugden - as you've gathered - is strongly in favour of a popular revolution."

"Which is also to say," Sugden said, "I'm very strongly against the notion of Mosley and his bully-boys or any other bargain-basement Mussolinis foisting their own notions by force on the rest of us. And since it doesn't seem as if the Establishment - present company excepted, Mr Cook - can see beyond their obsession with the threat from the Left to notice what the Right's been up to these last few years, I've been having to see what I can do about it myself. Finding Joe was on the same track was a godsend. And as you're friends of his -"

He shrugged, obviously intending to convey that amnesty had been declared in the class war for the time being, and politely gestured towards the open back of the lorry. "Sorry the proletariat can't offer you the standards of transport you're doubtless used to."

"I'll manage," Charlie said drily. "Compared to other things I've been dragged into by Joe I don't doubt that this is positive luxury. Can I trouble you for a hand up? When we evacuated from Shanghai one of my legs missed the flight out, and while the cork one's fairly serviceable for most purposes, it's not good for scrambling about."

Leaving them to it, Joe led the way round to the driver's cab and swung himself up, extending a hand to help Helen follow him. Sugden, having given Charlie a hand into the back of the lorry and latched the back doors, climbed competently into the cab the other side of her, and grinned.

"Doubtless you never expected you'd find yourself hitching a lift with a Communist, Miss Adamson."

"Actually, if Mummy could see me now she'd probably have seventeen different kinds of fit," Helen said candidly. A sudden thought of her mother's reaction if she could be magically transported abord the lorry made her face split into a broad grin. Setting off to drive through the night to who knew where with not one but three young men, and one an avowed Communist, and all armed to the teeth! Her mother's mind would be scarcely up to the boggling the situation demanded of it. Her grin was infectious, it appeared. Chris grinned back at her. 

Emboldened, she said, "But skip the Miss Adamson business. It's Helen. So how did you run into Joe?"

Chris extended a hand. "And I'm Chris. Glad to made your acquaintance, Helen. Well, it's a long story."

Joe steered the lorry out onto the main road. "It's a long drive. Anyway, the short version: we both fetched up - separately - at a nasty little gathering of Mosley's faithful in an Oddfellows Hall or similar somewhere on the outskirts of Sheffield. An assortment of speakers were spouting an assortment of foetid nonsense, none of it to the point, and I'd about concluded that no-one with any brains on Mosley's side would have trusted any of these imbeciles with any more information about what was going on than they could possibly help, when Chris's feelings about the whole business got the better of him, and, as the Quakers say, the spirit moved him. And he delivered himself of a short, but moving sermon on the subject of the last speaker."

"Aye," Chris said. "I were a damn fool to let him rile me, but it did me a backhand favour, nonetheless. Two of the bully-boys that crew always have on hand to make sure no-one makes the mistake of believing this is a free country dragged me out behind the hall, and another couple ducked out after them to assist the first pair in attending to my re-education."

He paused for breath, and Joe, lifting his hand up from the wheel to make an airy gesture, continued. "Well, given the home truths Chris had treated the platform too, I'd worked out he was probably about the only other man in the hall who felt the I did about the crew of thugs, weasels and resentful little upstarts who were running the show. Also, given how they'd been banging on about "being the true heirs to the spirit of Englishness" four against one didn't strike me as in the best public school tradition- at least, not as portrayed in The Magnet . Charlie might tell you different - Anyway, I sidled out unobtrusively, and pelted round to the back -"

"And right welcome he was, too, when he showed up," Chris said. "Got them from behind while they were too busy using my ribs as a football to pay proper attention. That gave me my chance to scramble clear, and start getting a bit of my own back. Only problem was, one of the four managed to dodge back into the hall to raise the alarm, and while we weren't doing too badly at odds of two to one, a hundred or so to one didn't look so clever. So we made a run for it while we could, and Joe offered me a lift out of town, which I gratefully accepted, me having temporarily made Sheffield too hot to hold me. Much to my surprise the "lift" turned out to be in a plane he'd got concealed in a handy field -"

"Not the Warhawk," Joe said. "Too conspic by half. An old crate of a Cessna trainer that Charlie managed to lay his hand on through his Shuttleworth connections. But good enough for runabout work."

"We must have been a hundred miles away before Mosley's boys had finished searching the next street," Chris said enthusiastically. "And I reckoned if there was someone around who felt the same about Mosley's crew and who could command that sort of fire-power - well, if he was for recruiting me, I was for signing up."

Joe grinned, his hands steady on the wheel, swinging the big lorry round a tight bend as it it had been nothing. "So we called up Andrew MacAllister - Chris had come across him a couple of years ago, so that was something else we had in common - and he put us in the way of having a cover story - we officially deliver high specification machine parts."

"But of course," Chris interjected, "what we're really doing is meeting up with people who are to our way of thinking, and can be trusted to do what's necessary to spread the word when the balloon goes up. We must have done a thousand miles in the last three days, up and down the country. But at least now, when balloon does go up, there's some people who know enough not to believe the police if they tell us "everything's under control" but to ask 'Whose control do you mean?' And who'll make it their business to secure their local strong points. Eh, I look forward to the moment when the British people wake up and see who were the ones they could trust in their darkest hour. That'll be a right eye opener, it will."

Helen thought there was something she should say, but couldn't think of anything. And it was dark, and the motion of the cab, however monotonous, was somehow soothing too. Twice she caught herself abruptly as her head drooped. At length she could stop it no more. In a borrowed set of workman's overalls, in the cab of a delivery van, Helen Adamson, the properly brought up daughter of a line of minor Hampshire gentry, put her head on the shoulder of a Communist Party activist, born in a Salford slum, and slept.


	16. Dex is alerted to Polly's danger and finds himself looking into the dark places in his own soul

Dex hesitated before the door of the _Pig and Whistle_. Joe's telegram, handed to him less than half an hour ago, crackled in his pocket. Its message had been more than disconcerting. Conveying emotional nuances in a coded telegram was not easy, but Dex detected a sense almost of diffidence about this one. Polly was in trouble, and Dex was best placed to rescue her, and he would do so, of course, that was an understood thing - Joe had placed the full resources of the Legion at his disposal to use as he thought fit in the endeavour - but Dex detected a sense of awkwardness, almost as if, since the relationship had shifted between them, Joe was holding back from giving him orders: particularly, given the complex tangle Polly had presented for them both in the past, in the present case. Belatedly, it occurred to him that Joe's awkward phrasing was intended to convey both that Joe would understand if he felt jealous and resentful in the instant situation, and to reassure him that there was no need.

He smiled slightly as he concealed the telegram in an inner jacket pocket. He and Joe were going to have to thrash out their ground rules in some detail once he got back to England, and the current crisis was less compelling. But for now -

It had not been difficult to stop by the Purser's Office and lay his hands on a passenger list, and to ascertain that, yes, a Miss P. Perkins was officially aboard. Trying to catch a glimpse of her was more difficult. Tourist and First were rigidly segregated, unless he could contrive an invitation from a First Class passenger to wander into their hallowed domain. And, in any event, did he really want to risk coming face to face with her? If she were an imposter, as Joe evidently suspected, she might nonetheless be capable of recognising him, and would in any event be on the lookout for any signs of untoward interest from anybody. And she might, of course, not be alone -

Thanks to that dramatic introduction first night out (the kid was doing well; he'd been to see him a couple of times in sick bay) he did have sources of information to which no other passenger had access.

The off-duty mess was half-full, and, thank goodness, two of his particular friends were in; the radio operator and one of the assistant engineers. A third man was with them; dark and dapper. They spotted Dex and hailed him with enthusiasm.

"We were needing a fourth," Tim, the radio operator, said enthusiastically. "You play whist, don't you, Dex?"

Dex shrugged. "Well, I prefer poker -"

The dark man laughed. "One thing I learned at my grandad's knee before I went in my first ship. Don't play poker with Yankees you don't know -"

A small stab of apprehension went through Dex. "Canadian, actually. From Toronto."

The dapper man looked beadily at him. "Really? Well, it's not often my ear gets fooled. I've been on the transatlantic runs since I was fourteen years old, and I wouldn't have placed your accent much north of New Jersey."

Fighting internal panic - who was the dapper man? Crew, or a Mosley plant? - he assumed an indifferent tone, and said, "Well, I've worked all over. Funny what accents stick and what don't."

"Aye, you have the right of it," George, the engineer, said. "Remember that Sudanese stoker we shipped three voyages ago, Tim? Skin black as the odds of hell, but with an Aberdonian accent even I had trouble understanding, and I'm no just from Pittenweem myself."

The dark man nodded, "Yes, it's an odd business. There was Charis Delahaye, three years ago, was it? On her outward voyage she was your original cockney sparrow; on the return crossing three months later when she'd conquered Broadway and got herself engaged to that railway magnate the only way you could tell her accent from the two Duchesses we had on board was that it was a trifle more classy."

"Well, I suppose you see all that sort of thing in First Class, Harold," Tim said. "At the beck and call of every dowager and her poodle. Sooner you than me."

Dex pricked up his ears. If the dark man was indeed a steward in First Class then he might be the key to his current problems.

He extended a hand. "Michael Newnham. And yes; I'd be happy to make a fourth for your card game."

The dapper man shook hands. "Harold Pearse. Pleased to meet you."

It was comparatively simple, once the game was in full swing, to engage him in conversation about the foibles of his passengers. Harold had, it seemed, seen them all in his time; princes and con-men, film stars and great financiers. Tim and George, whose jobs kept them far away from the paying passengers in the normal way of things, were at least fascinated enough to keep Harold primed with suitable questions at odd intervals as time and the intervals of the game dictated. And as the evening wore on Dex could slide his own unobtrusive enquiries into the conversation.

This trip was proving a disappointment. Not only was First Class unexpectedly half-empty, but the quality of the guests was not, Harold intimated, what he was used to. Dex presumed that the opportunity to do favours for the bored and well-connected formed a significant part of his income, and that the current trip had offered few pickings.

"For instance," Harold said,"there's a sick lady travelling with her nurse. Taken one of the best suites on the starboard side. Now I've had a lot of experience with invalids on board, and I like to think no-one knows as much as I do about making them comfortable at sea. It's the little things that make all the difference. But have I been allowed to get inside her cabin? I have not. Nor the stewardesses neither." 

He shook his head sadly, and collected the cards in front of him, adding another to the small pile of tricks he was amassing. "I've seen enough of the nurse all right; but she will insist on doing everything herself - well, with just the help of a manservant they've brought with them. Claims the patient's 'nervous' and 'mustn't be bothered by strangers'. Heaven knows how anyone can think being cooped up in a stuffy cabin with no fresh air for four days on end can do anyone any good, but of course 'Nurse knows best'. "

Dex pricked up his ears. He remembered the swathed figure being brought on board - surely there couldn't be two? - and the Nurse proclaiming loudly the benefits of sea air for her charge. And now it seemed she had never been allowed to leave her cabin after all. And it was now the fourth day out, and the passage one of the calmest Dex had known; even the most seasick of his fellow travellers had ventured on deck by now.

"Sounds more like a wardress than a nurse," Tim said lightly.

Harold tapped the side of his nose knowingly. "Well, I was wondering if there was something of that. One of the stewardesses heard some disturbance, night before last, coming from the cabin. She knocked, asked if there was anything she could do, and the nurse came out after a bit, and was quite short with her. Said her patient was just having a nightmare, and she'd just managed to get her back to sleep, and wasn't having her disturbed. But Heather told me that it sounded like a regular attack of the horrors, not a normal nightmare at all."

He shuffled the cards and dealt the next hand. "Still," he said philosophically, "just so long as this Miss Perkins doesn't start going after her pink mice or whatever with a revolver, like the Earl of Drummore."

Tim and George laughed; the reference was obviously known to both of them. They were obviously expecting Dex to ask about it, which he did, dutifully, but the details of the Earl's DTs were lost on him. If Polly was on board then she was here as a prisoner. The news that she was capable of a sustained burst of screaming was heartening, though his heart went out to her, as the longed for help from the stewardess arrived, only to be deflected by a few bland words from her guard. The nurse and the manservant were the known enemy, then, and there could be others; looking after any prisoner twenty-four hours a day would take some doing, and doubly so if that prisoner was Polly. 

What could he do? Invoke the authority of the Captain to search the cabin? Hardly; he was travelling on false papers and his own position was equivocal enough. And the Mosley crowd had pull; doubtless they had chosen their boat wisely. There would be a director of the Line, no doubt, or some other influential high-up who would have intervened to ensure that his "relative" with "nervous trouble" had a perfectly cocooned passage across the Atlantic. Or the Captain would have been made privy to another plausible cover story. Or, worst of all, the woman in the cabin would not be Polly, but an imposter travelling on her passport, and cultivating a reputation for being a recluse. In which case the real Polly might be anywhere, including in a shallow grave in some remote British wood.

Bile rose in his throat at the thought. Not just for her sake - though that was bad enough - but for Joe, who had finally confessed to him, the night before he sailed, that his frantic criss-crossing of the globe during the six months following the end of the Totenkopf affair had been, more than anything, in an effort to rid himself of Polly, but by natural attrition rather than with the brutality which he knew he would have to use to convince her that they had no future together. But not that it should end like this, never like this - Joe would never forgive himself -

He became aware of the others' surprised looks: he must, it seemed, have committed some cardinal breach of the rules of whist. Furthermore, they were half-way through a hand, and he hadn't the foggiest idea what were trumps.

He shrugged, and forced a laugh. "Sorry, guys, I guess I was wool-gathering."

He played on for an hour or so, and then, when Tim had to go on watch, took the opportunity of leaving too. The Chief Engineering officer, whom he had bumped into on his last visit to the kid in sickbay, had lent him a book, and now, he felt, was a good time to return it. Those layout diagrams of the ship's interior which decorated the Chief Engineer's cabin were giving him an inspiration.

It was indeed a good time. Simmons was in an expansive mood. A casual remark by Dex on some point of excellence in the ship's design had him jumping up from his seat to demonstrate, by reference to the plans, how it had been achieved. With very little further prodding the Chief Engineer's exposition turned into a virtual tour of the ship. Dex stored useful facts, relationships and proximities away. By the time he returned to his cabin a quarter of an hour later his initial glimmerings of an idea had become a beacon.  
He knelt down by his bed and flicked up the hasps on his cabin trunk. Joe had teased him, watching him pack the tools he personally thought of as "Wanted on Voyage", that he obviously believed in travelling with an entire spare ship on board. And asserted boldly that no doubt Dex would get from one end of the voyage to the next without, doubtless, having to lay hand on any of them. And then Dex had delved into his trunk on the first evening out, to make a minor modification to the hasp of the door, which had been annoying him, and found buried in the depths of his trunk Joe's blaster gun, the one he had made for him last year, wrapped in a note whose affectionate jokiness was merely a thin veneer over a deep concern for his safety which had brought a lump to his throat.

_Say it with weapons -_

Blaster and note together were now encased in the secret compartment that had defeated a dozen previous customs inspections. Dex did not disturb the compartment's hidden catch; ingenuity would serve him this evening, not brute force.

It took a little less than an hour to contrive what he wanted, ruthlessly sacrificing his travel alarm to provide the timer mechanism. Outside the noises of the ship began to be hushed, as all but the night owls among the passengers turned in, and the unsleeping staff muted the sounds of their duties as the big vessel steered a razor-sharp track across the glassy ocean on the last leg of her voyage.

The corridor he had selected for deploying the device was, thankfully, deserted when he arrived, and it was the work of seconds to secure it, prime it, and stroll down the nearest companionway, and along the network of passages which led to the starboard side of the vessel, and to the Tourist class smoking saloon, just below where the layout diagrams showed Polly's suite to be. 

The steward on duty was not one of his particular friends, but he was greeted with an alacrity almost bordering on relief, and rapidly supplied with a whisky and soda. On casting a quick look around he discovered the reason for the steward's enthusiasm; the only other inhabitant of the smoking room was Henderson, who was sipping port and smoking a powerful Havana cigar.

Dex grinned inwardly. Henderson - as he had discovered at dinner on the first night, when the fortunes of the sea had thrown them together - would be odds-on favourite in any Bore World Series. And he was pathologically incapable of not starting a conversation with anyone within range, and harder to escape from than the Ancient Mariner. For the purposes of establishing an alibi the current situation could hardly be bettered.

As Dex had suspected, he had scarcely ensconced himself into an armchair with his whisky and soda before Henderson had got up from his own seat, his nose sniffing the air like a mole emerging at dusk, and trying to detect predators in the vicinity, and drifted across the smoking room, glass in hand, ostensibly in search of the latest copy of Fortune magazine which was lying on the occasional table bolted to the floor next to Dex's seat. Having secured it, rather than resume his original seat, he flopped down into the opposite armchair.

"So, you're crossing to attend a hearing at the US Patent Office, hey?"

Dex acknowledged this opening salvo with a bare nod. Henderson's interrogation of him at dinner on the first night had revealed as much. Henderson had then endeavoured to pick Dex's brains at length about an invention he had, apparently, devised in his spare time. Could he only tear enough valuable hours from his daytime business (he was a cod-liver oil importer, travelling to Canada to investigate cheaper sources of supply) and, in Dex's private opinion, manage to bypass the second law of thermodynamics comprehensively, the invention, once perfected and patented would inevitably lead to Henderson becoming a multi-millionaire many times over, and recognised as a public benefactor with a statue in the principal thoroughfare of his own home town. He had told Dex as much with many self-important asides.

"I've got an invention, you know, myself," Henderson said, leaning over. From behind the bar, where he was polishing a glass, the steward shot Dex a sympathetic glance and muttered something. Dex, whose lip-reading had been honed over years of detecting people's comments over the thunder of machinery and the roar of plane engines, could detect he was saying, "Bear up, mate. With any luck the mucking ship might hit an iceberg."

_You have no idea how close you are_

He grinned back, and took a swig of whisky and soda, turning politely towards Henderson. 

"You mentioned something about that, at dinner, the first night? If it's not betraying any trade secrets, would you like to tell me more about it?"

Henderson had barely started his exposition - he could hardly have been half-an-hour in - when the ship's peace was torn apart by the howl of sirens. Both Henderson and Dex sprang to their feet.

The steward, disciplined in the crisis, opened a locker, and handed out two cork-ballasted Boddy flotation jackets.  
"Please put them on, gentlemen," he directed. "Your assembly point is on the upper boat deck, up the companionway stairs just here. You shouldn't go back to your cabins until one of the ship's officers has confirmed it's safe, though."

Henderson set off up the companionway at a determined galumph. Dex followed in his wake. 

The background shudder of the great engines which had been so constant a background since they had come on board that they had become like breath or heartbeat, only consciously perceptible if you made the effort to listen for them, suddenly became shockingly intrusive, as their note changed and the boat slowed to a stop.  
Up on the boat-deck all was pandemonium. First, Tourist and Third mixed promiscuously without concern for caste distinctions. Passengers in every state of dress or undress from full evening wear to pyjamas (but all set off by the ubiquitous Boddy jackets) were milling around, catching at the arms of anyone in uniform who passed, in the hope of gleaning some idea of what was going on. Whispers and rumours - there was a fire in the bunker - no, someone from Third class had been seen to throw himself over the rail - someone had caught the sight of a lifeboat from a foundered craft in the reflected glow of the deck lights - spread through the mob like fitful breezes rippling through ripe barley.  
The crew, grim-faced but calm, were trying to check names against lists, quell incipient panic and - as Dex knew, none better - project an air of calm omniscience about the causes of the alarm and the prognosis for restarting the engines when they could have no clue whatsoever what was going on.

From further along the boat deck there came the sound of a strident female voice upraised in indignant remonstrance with someone else, someone whose voice he recognised. The direction was right, at least -

"But I've only just given the poor dear her injection! She's sleeping like a baby - wouldn't wake if it was the Last Trump -"

"In her cabin! Nurse, believe me, no-one could be as concerned for Miss Perkins's well-being as I am. But we must get her to the boat-station."

"The boat-station! Up on deck, chilling her to the bone, poor lamb, so far out and in this dreadful climate, and with all those strange people around too, so that if she did come to herself, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it weren't to set off one of her funny turns, and then we'd never hear the last of it."

The stout, blue-uniformed person in the nurse's veil came into view at that moment. Dex turned slightly away, taking a step backwards so as to throw his face into shadow.

"And anyway, I haven't seen hide or hair of Sam, and how can I get her up on deck without anyone to help me?"

The nurse's voice had a note of unassailable triumph. In turn, Harold's voice was that of a man forced back against the wall.

"Well, on that, I'm sure we can - But Nurse - I have to insist - if - not that I'm saying it's at all likely, of course - but in the remote contingency that we might have to abandon, those extra few minutes might mean the difference between life and death, and not just for Miss Perkins."

"Abandon! But that's pure alarmism, surely? I can feel nothing wrong - "

Dex could hear Harold's carefully refined tones beginning to fray at the edges against the granite of the nurse's resolve.

"Nurse! I can assure you when I was on the Atalanta, that went down off Malta in '15, the first few minutes before she started to list were even quieter than this."

A fluffy, kittenish girl (she had confided to Dex at dinner a couple of nights ago that she was on her way out to Winnipeg to marry her fiancé) must have overheard; she broke out into panicked, hiccupping sobs. The crew member who had been taking the roster at the boat station shot Harold a filthy look.

Dex decided it was high time he intervened. "Need a hand, Pearse?" he enquired. As Harold turned towards him Dex favoured him with a broad wink. Harold's tense expression relaxed slightly. Here, at last, it seemed, was someone who appreciated at least some of the unspoken and unspeakable nuances of the current position. 

"I'd be most obliged, sir. Nurse Brittain is concerned - very reasonably - about her patient -"

"I heard. I'd be glad to give you a hand helping her up on deck, ma'am. I see you're in a difficulty with your man missing. At his own boat station, no doubt. I'll help carry your Miss Perkins. This way, is it?"

Before she knew what was happening to her, he had caught her arm and was bustling her back along the deck. Pearse, realising the nurse was still radiating resistance, bobbed behind at his elbow. 

The fluffy-faced girl caught them up before they had gone ten strides. "Can I help?"

His face must have shown his shock, because she added, with a slight access of dignity, "I - um - well, I'd feel better if I had something to do, to take my mind off things."

He could see the truth of that in her face. He smiled, nodding encouragingly, and she nodded back, recognising his encouragement in her turn.

"Well - I thought Miss - um - Perkins might find it less of a shock if she - um, well, if there was another lady there. In her cabin, I mean. If she were to wake up."

There was a response ready on his lips. But Harold was there before him. "Miss - Austen, isn't it? Well, that's very helpful of you. Very helpful indeed. I'm sure Nurse Brittain will be very glad indeed of your help."

From what he could catch in his sidelong glance Nurse Brittain was, in Dex's humble opinion, anything but: she looked as though she'd happily tip them over the side herself. But Harold Pearse knew his passengers and he knew his psychology, evidently: Miss Alison Austen might be a little fluff-head, but she was, by all standards applied by the British middle-class, a lady, and Nurse Brittain was merely the hired help. So once Miss Austen had chosen to Do Her Duty and Take An Interest nothing whatsoever could stand in her way.

Short of outright war, of course.

For a prolonged cold moment on the boat deck as Dex took in the full hostility of the nurse's expression and her tense posture he regretted not packing the blaster pistol after all. Then her shoulders relaxed; she, too, had accepted the fait accompli. His life had been shaped, one way and another, by forces of convention too strong to be deflected; it was ironic in some ways to see that social opinion could work with him as well as against him.

"She's not decent," the nurse said, fighting a last defence as she turned at the cabin door, still braving them down like at Roncesvalles or Thermopylae, Dex thought, if either of them had been in such a dirty cause - and perhaps the dirty causes still had their own Roncesvalles and Thermopylaes - that was a thought, and maybe Nurse Brittain thought so, too -

"Oh, don't worry about that," Alison Austen said brightly. "All girls together, aren't we, Nurse? We'll soon have her straight. Just you stay outside until I whistle, Mr Newnham."

The air was frosty, and there was across the salt tang of the sea a deep exhalation of the pine forests lining the shores of the dark unseen continent down to port, less than ten hours voyage away now. When Alison whistled Dex had already become chilled, leaning against the ship's rail, chewing gum as another man might have been smoking. The cabin was neat; bare, rather, to Dex's trained eye. He had lived in variants on barracks for well over a third of his life now, and knew the difference between "well-ordered" and "unoccupied".

The patient - he was still reserving judgement on matters of identity - had somehow been got into the wheel chair in his absence. She had Polly's silver-fox cloak thrown across her, concealing all but her eyes and forehead. Dex, who had heard all the ructions about that silver-fox from both sides (including the strident reflections on people who flitted off to Moscow like other people went to Cincinnati, so why on earth couldn't they bring back sable while they were about it?) gulped. He went forward nervously to take the handles of the chair. The incomparable hair spreading out before him was unmistakeable, surely, as was the tiny scar at the nape of the neck, courtesy of the struggle they had all had to free themselves from Totenkopf's lair.

"Just a moment," the nurse said fussily. She had a black toque with veil in her hand. "Miss Perkins's eyes will be sensitive to the light, when we get up on deck."

Polly's head lolled back, suddenly, before the nurse could get to her with the disguising hat. She was - just - recognisable as herself. Her eyes were rolled back in her head; the pupils the tiniest of pin-pricks. Her lips - though still immaculately lipsticked - were slack, and flecks of dribble spattered them. Whatever drug they had given her must be powerful, Dex thought automatically, before other thoughts caught up with him, and he wondered with a certain sick fascination if he was more relieved or disappointed that Joe hadn't seen her like this; no longer beautiful, a hideous travesty - in a sense, a preview of how she might appear when old and senile.

Alison Austen emitted a quick sharp sound of revulsion. It brought him to himself.

"Quite right, Nurse," he said sharply. "I can see Miss Perkins isn't herself at the moment." He helped her adjust the hat and veil. "Lead on, Macduff."

His mind blazing with fury at himself - Joe had been right, it seemed, to be wary of the corrosive effects of jealousy (Dex realised, suddenly and for reasons not entirely disassociated from silver fox fur, that he had no doubt had a belly-full of it in the past) - and at those still unseen enemies who for their greed and sport had degraded Polly so - he lead the way to the boat-deck, manoeuvring the wheel-chair as delicately though it contained Ming porcelain bedded in nitro-glycerine.

They had an hour or so more of it on the boat deck; chill boredom edged, for the most part with apprehension (even for Dex, who had his own demons to confront) before the relieved, weary crew received some signal to stand down, and they were released. He took the same care to return Polly to her quarters as he had used to bring her there - he had made a point of standing across the corner of the boat deck the nurse had colonised, so that no-one had come up to disturb them. The nurse had thanked him for his tact. Alison Austen had spent most of the interim period sobbing quietly in a corner and flinching away from Polly as though she was contagious. Polly had shown no signs of recognising her surroundings, breathing stertorously and occasionally jerking convulsively, like a dog chasing rabbits while asleep. If she had shown signs of consciousness he might have risked the Captain, false papers and all, but her captors had planned even for a risk like this. With the benefit of the respectable Miss Austen's testimony no-one would doubt that Polly was a society lady with a regrettable weakness and, that being so, no-one would be more than conventionally concerned about her welfare.

Once he had returned Polly to her cabin he made tracks for the radio room. Especially given the recent excitement he had no doubt that Tim would be still on watch.

He was. He turned, initially wary and apprehensive as Dex came in, and then grinned. "God! I'll never call a crossing dull again until I'm tied up safe at one end or the other. Fun on the boat decks? Have a jar?"

He indicated the teapot which was steaming to one side of him. Dex accepted gratefully.

"So," he said, assuming a casualness he was far from feeling, "any idea what that was all about?"

In the darkness of the radio room, his face lit only by the glows of his various readouts and the glowing tip of the cigarette he had lit - it moved like a glow-worm as he gestured - Tim grinned. "Short-circuit in a junction box gets you five. Prank by two Harvard kids coming back from a season in Europe their families thought might 'settle them down' and who think setting off the sirens for their own amusement gets you ten. If their respective Daddies didn't own ten percent of the Line, and if the Old Man had had a shred more proof I fancy he'd have tipped them straight over the side on spec - Anyway, what can I do for you, apart from the tea?"

Dex reached out with a piece of paper on which he had scribbled half a page of hasty code. "Can you send that for me, please? I guess they'll have heard on the other side we've been held up some, and the USPTO hearing's scheduled for day after tomorrow. It'd set a few minds at rest if I let them know we're on our way again. Also, they said when I set out that if it looked like we were going to be delayed at all they'd send a plane for me, rather than wait for me to get to Washington on the train. Make sure I'd plenty of time to be briefed by the company attorney."

Tim looked faintly taken aback. "That's going to cost someone a packet."

Dex shrugged. "Not compared to what it's cost the company if they don't win this one. Royalty of not less than 10% on ten million units at five dollars apiece. You figure the math for yourself. Anyway, they've got the dough, and it's not for the likes of me to tell them how not to spend it."

Tim raised an eyebrow. "Who did you say you worked for again?"

Dex hadn't; it'd been thought safer so. But back in England he and Joe had discussed the pros and cons at length, and he had his answer ready. "Shuttleworths."

The _Empress_ was Clydeside-built. Tim let out a faintly awed whistle. He held out his hand for the telegram script.

"I'd best be having that, then. Be through within the next ten minutes. Also, when we dock, it'll save you an hour or so if you come out with the crew; dodge that messing around with Customs?"

Dex blinked, and then smiled. The wheel of fortune was turning once more, and that this time his luck was coming uppermost.

He thanked Tim, finished the tea, and made his way unobtrusively back to his berth.


	17. Helping an old friend out of a spot of bother is the best way to kill two birds with one stone

The first hawsers had barely been tightened round the bollards on the quayside before the crew were allowed to disembark. The passengers - chafing in frustration at their imprisonment within sight of land - might be unaware of it, but the workers on the dockside knew how much hard work had brought the liner safely into port, and how much unseen slaving it would take before she was fit for sea again, and they were not going to let the crew's precious hours of leave be eroded by dockside bureaucracy if they could possibly help it.

No-one had cavilled at Dex's presence as an honorary crew member, and the formalities were brief and perfunctory. He shouldered his cabin baggage, said his farewells to Tim and the rest of them, and strode out of the Customs shed into the thin, chill, wintry sunshine of the Saint John harbourside.

Almost before he had had time to get his bearings Milo had caught him in a huge, effusive bear-hug of greeting. As Dex broke free, somewhat winded, he spotted another couple of Legion men among the crowd of hangers-on. Doubtless there were others. NO MISTAKES POSSIBLE his telegram had stated and it seemed he had been taken at his word.  
Milo's presence emphasised that. Over his years in the Legion he'd made a speciality of getting hostages out of situations, snatching back kidnapping victims unharmed, and breaking prisoners out of jail. He earned the Legion a fortune from his skills, but it was not for that reason alone that so far as the Legion was concerned he walked on water. A little over three and a half years ago he'd earned a debt of gratitude that no subsequent misconduct - and his murderously incendiary temper was as notorious as his talents were celebrated - could ever extinguish.

"Details!" he said urgently now, snapping his fingers. "I gotta have details, Dex. Your telegram wasn't worth a heap of sand. So tell me now. You saw her last. What state is she in? If we bust her out, do we need to calculate for carrying her, or will she be able to come out on her own feet? How many do they have on their side; backup, descriptions, armaments?"

Dex obliged as best he could; he could see from Milo's disappointed mouth and the furrows in his brow that he regarded his intelligence as painfully inadequate. 

Nevertheless, he darted off into the crowd, no doubt to ensure the word was spread. By the time he returned Dex had his own questions for him.

"So," he said, "what have you brought?"

Milo gave a slow, satisfied smile: it made him look rather like a sealion which had just successfully bluffed its way into a fish market. "Squad and a half of men; best ground combat guys I could beat up in a hurry. Coupla recce 'planes. And as for heavy back-up, supposing we have to go in somewhere all guns blazing, well, we guessed it was just the job The Pig was designed for."

Dex's face must have shown his approval because Milo's grin broadened. The Pig - indelibly christened from Joe's succinct, profanity-garnished estimate of the Legion's chances of ever getting it airborne when he'd first seen the designs on Dex's drawing board - was ostensibly a cargo 'plane, whose cavernous interior could carry anything from agricultural machinery up to a couple of medium-sized trucks. And she had, too; there were the cargo manifests to prove it. But Dex, drawing upon his reading about Naval Q ships, had turned her into something very much more than a handy beast of burden for Legion men and materiel. Her deceptive structure could pack in any weaponry up to and including battle cannon, and her auxiliary fuel capacity meant that while she would never achieve stunning prodigies of speed, her flying range was unparalleled.  
With that kind of firepower at their back the Legion could break Polly out of a fortress.

Always assuming that they didn't manage to lose her trail amid the crowd on the dockside, that was.

Milo didn't seem to be worrying. As the streams of passengers at last started to descend the Empress's gang-planks he whisked Dex away to his car.

"They can manage without us for a while," he said. "Anyhow, I don't want to take the risk the bad guys see you with me and start doing some figuring on their own account. Besides, there's someone you need to meet."

They had gone a mile or more past the city limits when Milo pulled over into a diner. There wasn't anything much around it; it was almost hidden among silver birches by the roadside. As he stepped out of the car Dex filled his lungs with the clean, spicy exhalation that he had grown to associate with the North, away from the cramped cities and the small meannesses of twentieth century civilisation.

There was only one car parked outside, and its driver was tucked into a corner of the diner, drinking coffee and making inroads into what must once had been a formidable stack of pancakes. He looked up as Dex entered and his face lit into a smile, almost, Dex thought, like some guy in the movies, seeing the Seventh Cavalry appear over the hill to the relief of the beleaguered fortress.

There was a sickening discontinuity about that thought, given that the other man was wearing the uniform of the RCMP.

Dex recognised him instantly, even though Petersen had mustered out of the Legion to marry his high school sweetheart less than six months after Dex had been recruited. And the big man's help and encouragement during those first few bewildering days and weeks had been something he remembered still with gratitude.

He waved a hand in greeting. "Dearborn! Great to see you again. Life suiting you? You're looking good."

"You too," Dex said. Petersen grimaced.

"Still as lousy a liar as ever, Dearborn." 

The protest died on his lips in the teeth of the big Canadian's expression.

"I got a mirror, Dex," Petersen said. "I know I look like a guy who can't sleep and who spends the day looking back over his shoulder and trying not to jump at unexpected loud noises."

He shrugged. "You wanted to see me looking well, you should have come through here six months ago." He attacked the rest of the stack of pancakes with his fork. "But that was before I started to suspect my boss was on the take."

Milo's face looked like Dex was feeling. "You're not serious? On the take? In the Mounties?"

Dex could have echoed the note of dumbfounded surprise in Milo's voice; in public legend the RCMP's legendary persistence came in only by a short neck in front of their reputation for unassailable probity. 

Petersen's mouth twisted. "Oh, there's bad apples in any barrel if you dig down far enough. We don't advertise it, and I'd say the Force had fewer than most, but still - But true, six months ago I'd not have suspected something like this."

He summoned the waitress who arrived with a fresh pot of coffee. Dex, who had breakfasted on board, and Milo who had presumably grabbed something earlier, both declined offers of something more substantial. When the waitress had vanished again Petersen resumed his story; Dex could trace the relief from tension in the lines of his shoulders merely at being able to talk to someone he could trust about it.

"It happened like this," he said abruptly, making stabbing motions down onto the polished table with a spare fork. "You guys aren't greenhorns; you know the best way to deal with trouble is to watch where it might start and drop a pan of water on any sparks before they can ignite anything else. So - part of our brief is to keep an eye on undesirable aliens."  
Dex nodded. Petersen gestured again with his fork. 

"It must have been early last May sometime - we thought we'd had the last of the winter, till a blizzard hit us a few days later - anyway, a wealthy American called Mrs Fraser showed up. Took a big house on the edge of city limits, on the way out to Fredricton."

He pulled out a cigarette case, offered it round, lit one and inhaled deeply."She was on our list to check out, all right. According to her papers she was the widow of a well-off guy with a meat-packing business in Chicago; our information said different."

The diner was quiet at that early hour; the waitress had retreated into somewhere at the back at some unobtrusive signal from Petersen. 

He continued. "She'd run a string of establishments down along the lake shore there. Classy joints - as far as anything in that line can be - by all accounts."

Petersen took a swig of coffee. "Looked as if she'd made her pile, and decided to settle down - retire to a nice quiet location, where she didn't have to rub shoulders day in, day out with local worthies who she knew just that little too much about to make for good neighbourliness. So she'd picked Saint John. And, by and large, it is a quiet location. Like I said, Dex; you should have come through last summer. We could have invited you to a bonfire on the beach, maybe even a lobster boil."

Dex ducked his head in brief acknowledgement; there was a febrile air about the big Canadian that disturbed him on a fundamental level. Petersen's fingers picked unnoticed at the lapel of his uniform.

"Provided she'd really retired, we couldn't do much about that. But we thought we ought to make her a semi-official visit. Think up some excuse to check out her papers. Just to tip her off we were keeping an eye, so to speak. In case she got bored and started to think about going back into business."

For a moment a wintry smile threatened to break through Petersen's facade; he looked ten years younger. "It wasn't difficult to find volunteers - her fame really had gone before her. And we don't get that many wicked adventuresses in these parts. In the end, to avoid arguments, we drew cards. I drew the jack of diamonds and Superintendent MacMurtry drew the queen of spades, and so we duly went off to check her out."

"Anyway, she was all sweetness and light, and her papers checked - the guys who see to that sort of thing at her sort of level do good work, and this was routine, not a serious shake-down - and that would most likely have been that if McMurtry hadn't chosen to take a look down her bookshelves - he's quite the amateur psychologist - and spotted a shelf of books on spiritualism."

Petersen took a swig of coffee. "And that was when it all went pear-shaped. He'd lost someone in the Halifax explosion in '17, I gather. I never got the details straight, and I guess I never will. All the same, right inside that guy who was 99.99% a good cop was that tiny little will to believe. Just enough of a flaw to make himself vulnerable. And I guess when she saw him looking at that shelf of books on 'Can the Dead Speak?' she saw her chance, and she backed it with everything she had."

He topped their coffee cups up again. "From that day on, the Super was a different man. He was forever going up there, joining in the séances - nothing odd about that, you understand. Half of the best society in Saint John's went wild for table-rapping this summer."

There was a note in his voice that told Dex he was getting to the heart of his story. "And then, there came the death. Guy walking his dog one morning found the body. She was lying out on the rocks down on the edge of the water. Nice middle-aged English woman, she'd been. One of the summer visitors, come up here to study migrating birds or some such. Taken a cottage out along the Fundy shore."

He traced a pattern with his finger-tip in a patch of spilled coffee. "It looked like an accident, all right. She got up early - who knows why? The rocks had weed on them; anyone might have slipped and banged their head. No reason for anyone to go poking their noses in, asking awkward questions. No reason whatsoever."

His face was bitter. "That was what my mistake was. I decided to go along to her cottage - I'd not got a lot on that morning, and I'd met her a couple of times and liked what I'd seen. And she'd died a long way from home - I guess I'd got some vague idea of finding out who the next of kin was; thought they'd appreciate a letter from someone who'd actually known her a little."

He took an incautious mouthful of the coffee which had just been replenished by the waitress, and spluttered. When his mouth had cooled down he continued. "She hadn't locked up before going out - I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was the photographs there were around the place. Climbing groups. Chamonix, Norway, the Rockies. She must have been quite the Alpinist."

Dex could see Milo was thinking the same as he was. Milo got his words out first. "Sure, Petersen. But that's not to say she couldn't have put her foot on a patch of weed, anyway. That's luck for you. We've all seen it. Remember Martiniuk? A dozen or more drop missions into enemy territory without a scratch and manages to kill himself when his step-ladder collapsed as he was changing a light bulb."

Petersen nodded, slowly, gravely. Dex could see, in the lines of his mouth, that he'd had that exact same thought himself, over and over, no doubt in the still dark of the night. Doubtless he'd even thought it in that sunlit morning along the Fundy shore, months ago.

"True enough. I don't suppose I'd have made a fuss about it." He paused. "Until I thought to look inside her writing case, and found a half-finished letter to the British Psychical Society."

The dead woman, he explained, had evidently been to a séance of Mrs Fraser's, and not cared for what she'd seen. Others in her place would have simply not come again; she saw herself as having a duty to get to the bottom of what was going on, and expose it. She'd stuck around; planted hints of a fictitious lover lost long ago in Flanders' mud. Her Sandy had duly appeared and given her various consoling messages. She'd pressed it further; Mrs Fraser had risen meretriciously to the occasion. The letter set out the deceits and subterfuges the writer had discovered, in damning detail.

The letter had given him pause for thought, and then, as he'd left the cottage, a neighbour had sidled up to him, and, before he could say anything, had eyed his uniform, and muttered, "I guess you'll be here to find out more about that terrible argument there was here last night, someone and that poor woman who was found dead on the shore going at it hammer and tongs?"

It hadn't been, of course, but he was too good a policeman to pass up the opportunity. Three-quarters of an hour later he took his departure, having established that the two voices raised in argument had both been unquestionably female - regretfully, the neighbour confided her had been unable to distinguish any words - and that a minute or so after the sounds of the quarrel had ceased, he had heard a car start up and accelerate away, not towards town, as the neighbour had been expecting, but up the hill, as though the driver had been heading up towards Fredricton.

"I suppose," Petersen said, "she'd told Mrs Fraser she planned to expose her as a fraud. She was that sort of woman; she'd not do anything behind anyone's back."   
His suspicions thoroughly aroused he'd gone back to the station and made a full report to his superior. Asked to have a full crime-investigation team sent down to the shore. Suggested that they send a member of the Force to bring Mrs Fraser and her chauffeur in for questioning about their movements the previous night.

And found himself running up against a brick wall. Whether it was gratitude to Mrs Fraser for easing his bereavement, or whether he'd let something slip at a séance that she had been able to hold over him ever since, MacMurtry had killed the investigation stone-dead. Insisted the only possible verdict for the inquest was accidental death. Threatened - tempers were running high by that time - to have Petersen posted to the back end of the Yukon if he questioned his judgment on the matter further. And the Englishwoman had gone unavenged to her lonely grave by the Fundy shore, while Mrs Fraser continued to hold court for the select believers of Saint John in the big house along the highway out towards Fredericton. MacMurtry and Petersen, in their own way, were left to live with the summer's ghosts, and the rusty knife-edges of their mutual suspicions and resentment. It was, Dex thought, small wonder Petersen looked so drawn and haggard; he'd not have swapped his own last few months, fraught as they'd been, for one half of what the Canadian must have been through.

He reached out his right hand and grasped Petersen's wrist firmly. "Look, just hang on in there, OK?" he said. "Whatever happens, you're old Legion. We won't let you down. We'll sort our business here, and then be back to see what we can do about your difficulties."

Petersen looked up gratefully, but whatever he might have been planning to say died on his lips as the waitress appeared from the back. "Inspector Petersen? Phone call for you."  
He vanished into the back, but they hardly had time to do more than exchange glances before he emerged, his face ablaze with powerful emotions.

"Well, as if I hadn't been pleased enough to see you already!" He turned, swiftly, to look at Milo. "This girl you says been kidnapped - she'll have come off the boat in a wheelchair?"

Before Milo could respond Dex was nodding. "Yes, pushed by a hefty nurse in uniform - she'd be drugged to the eyeballs, no doubt, and most likely wearing a silver-fox fur and a black-toque with a veil."

Petersen snapped his fingers. "Bingo! That was my man down at the docks - I told you we kept an eye on suspicious aliens, didn't I? The girl you suspect of having been snatched came through Customs less than ten minutes ago - exactly as you describe." He put both his palms flat on the table and leant over towards Dex. "There was a car waiting for her and her nurse. A big Packard. Registered out of the US: Illinois plates to be precise."

"Ill-" Dex began, but Milo was ahead of him.

"You mean, the car belonged to the Fraser broad?"

Petersen nodded. "And it was being driven by her chauffeur, my man says. Well, in the circumstance I can't take official notice but - I take it you put a tail on it?"

Milo nodded. "And extra guys in reserve, in case they shake the first tail. But if you'd any idea where they might be going, that would help, too." 

Petersen blinked, and thought. "The car drove off out of town. Not the Fredricton highway - the other way. Out towards Rothesay."

Dex pricked up his ears. "Rothesay? I recognise that - hang on a minute! That where that aeronautical genius lives - what's his name, Turnbull? Guy who developed the variable pitch propeller - built a wind-tunnel in his workshop way back in '01 - Jeez, I wonder if there's a chance I could meet him -"

Milo clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Dex! This is not the time to go autograph-hunting, or whatever it is you've got in mind. Look, Petersen, cut to the chase. If there's one thing I know about aeronautical geniuses -"

He looked expressively at Dex, and Petersen laughed.

"They don't make do with a wind tunnel when there's a test field available. I take it there a strip out Rothesay way?"

Petersen nodded. "And buoys for float-planes down in the cove, too. We'd not be able to service the remoter communities in the winter if we couldn't fly in supplies. And some of the guys in the crate hiring business round here are pretty hand-to-mouth: doubt they'd ask any questions if someone with a pile of dollars needed a kite and a pilot for some business on the QT."

Milo was up and heading towards the car. "We'd better radio the guys, warn them that the quarry's likely to go airborne, tell LeFauve and Deacon to get ready to go up at a second's notice."

"Wait a moment." Petersen, his face alive with all the energy of a man who'd been at last ordered into action after a long and morale sapping period of guard duty, pulled a map out of his case. "Tell your guys that if they lose the tail once they get airborne, they could do worse than a sweep past here." His finger stabbed down on a fiord which ran between two long headlands, up in the the North-west of the province. "There's some species of plant up here. Owned by some US company. Said to be for experimental wireless testing. No road access, but there's a Mi'qmak settlement a couple of coves along. They live by fishing, trapping - and information."

There was a gleam in his eyes; his balance had been restored and the assurance that his suspicions of Mrs Fraser were justified and nemesis was on her tail couldn't have hurt either, Dex judged.

"After all, with you guys mismanaging the liquor business down South the way you've been doing all these years, if we didn't find some way of keeping an eye on our remote bays and off-shore islands we'd fetch up as nothing more than the States' unofficial liquor warehouse. Anyway, there's a base up there which from time to time there are rumours gets used by rum-runners, though we've never caught anyone at it. But we got a tip off a couple of days ago that there's been a lot of activity round there, recently. Planes coming in by night and being gone by morning - fishing boats with their lights out - the odd shot being fired at native fishing canoes that get too close -"

Milo grinned. "Now that's intelligence worth its weight in gold. We'll be seeing you, Petersen."

He grinned back; a little of that lazy assurance which Dex remembered from the very first days he'd met him had come back into his expression. "Don't do anything I might have to take official notice of, will you? Or if you must, do it up to Legion standards, please? And if you get anything solid on Mrs Fraser -"

"You'll be the first to know," Dex promised.

Then they were out on the road, and the big car was flying down the hill, while Milo barked orders into the radio that Dex had had fitted as standard into Legion cars, and the whole powerful weight of the rescue mission swung into operation at last.


	18. Polly has to improvise to survive

Polly curled around herself in a tight ball, trying to conserve heat as she lay on the hard bench-like bunk, huddling the thin blanket around her, feeling waves of nausea wash through her as whatever drugs they had been using on her these last few days started to ebb out of her system, leaving her purged, shaken and despairing.  
She struggled to remember anything - anything at all - out of the chaotic jumble of images, drug-distorted into the horrors of delirium, which had filled the gap since her last clear memory, that of Dr Fischer's eyes gleaming with pleasure, and his tongue flicking out to lick his thin lips as he pronounced - with a sinous, caressing pleasure - what he had decreed her fate to be: a brood mare for his and his cronies' perverted brave new world.

That thought brought her close to hysteria, so she was forced to sit up on the bench, clasping her arms around her bent knees, and repeat over and over, like a Coué exercise, "They aren't going to win. You are stronger than they are. They aren't going to win."

The cell, while solid, had a make-shift look about it, although it had not originally been intended to hold captives at all, but had been converted from some secure storeroom or other. The bunk was roughly nailed together planks; the sanitary arrangements correspondingly primitive; there was a single bare light-bulb for illumination. No window, unfortunately. Working out where she was - the first step to a successful escape - was going to take ingenuity.

"Well, you've got plenty of that, Perkins," she told herself roughly.

First things first; try to work out where she was.

Next, inventory anything she had which might aid her escape and subsequent survival.

Then, form a plan.

Finally, execute it.

"Simple, Perkins," she told herself. "All done with logic." 

So: what could she remember?

For days she had been conscious - so far as the word could describe her state at all - of a throbbing pulse which had informed everything in her immediate environment. Now her brain was clearing, she started to associate it with memories since before the bad time. Engines - most recently, a plane engine. It had been - she felt a sudden sense of triumph at having worked it out - it had been a plane that had brought her here. That would have been after the face had leaned over her - the other face, not the soft one with the multiple chins, but the hard one with the enamelled red lips and the sable collar - she could remember, now the delirious drug-soaked nightmare had receded, the sense of angry resentment that had filled her on realising that the collar was indeed sable, though not now why that had struck her as the ultimate affront - anyway, the face had leant over her, the expression appraising, and a voice which seemed to come from somewhere else had said, "Well. She'll do, certainly."

But the soft face, before - she remembered that face hanging over her bed, inches away from her - the throbbing had had a different note, then - she could remember screaming on and on, and the soft throbbing going on all the while - and the ever present threat of the needle and the soft, evil-smelling cloth over her nostrils.

Again, it was almost a physical relief to clutch at fact, not surmise, to make connections, to start to relate to a physical universe from which she had been estranged, it seemed, forever.

A boat. The faint soft throbbing was something she remembered from previous ocean crossings. And it had gone on - even assuming the time distorting effects of the drugs - seemingly forever. It could hardly have been a Channel crossing, or one to the nearer parts of the Continent. But the International Brethren of the New Jacobite Order had close and influential connections in the States, perhaps even its genesis there. They would have taken her across the Atlantic if at all possible. And - another connection - the hard-faced woman had had an American accent.

"Well, Perkins," she told herself, "that's good. You now know exactly where you are. North America!"

The joke, feeble as it was, raised her spirits. She swung her legs down to the floor and stood up, shakily. The bare-boarded floor struck cold through the soles of her stockinged feet. A thought struck her, and she carefully removed the stockings. The bastards had taken her shoes away, but she'd covered enough sleazy crime stories from the back alleys and squalid parts of town in her days as a cub reporter to know just how lethal a silk stocking could be between the hands of a sufficiently determined killer.

After the last few days, and with the memory of the obscene promise in Fischer's face spurring her desperation, she had little doubt that she could be determined enough. 

She prowled round the cell, trying to find anything else she might use, but it was fruitless. The rough boards of the bunk were nailed down too firmly for her to lever any of them up. The light-bulb, smashed, would give her a sharp weapon, but how to aim it accurately in the dark?

She was worrying away at a raised nail in the floor of the remote corner of the cell when she heard a jangle from outside the door. She scrambled to her feet as it started to swing open. This might be her only chance. Her stockings were on the bunk - the only thing within reach was the stinking slop bucket -

"Lady, you gotta -" the guard began, before the flung contents of the bucket caught him full in the face. There was a loud explosion and a sharp whine as a bullet passed close enough to her cheek that she felt the breeze of its passing. Polly's instincts had taken charge so quickly she hadn't even noticed he'd been carrying a gun. As he reeled back, clutching at his stinging eyes, she dived forwards and brought the heavy galvanised bucket down on his head with all her strength. He went sprawling - the gun skidded across the floor of the cell. Polly grabbed it and approached the stricken guard with caution. He was, however, unconscious; that heavy snorting breathing wasn't faked. Rapidly - that gunshot must have alerted everyone within earshot - she tied his hands behind his back with one of the stockings, and then tied his ankles with the other. For want of anything else to tie him to, she put the free end of the stocking binding his feet round the door-handle, and tied it tight, hoisting his legs eighteen inches or so in the air.

Just as she was finishing running footsteps echoed from the corridor outside. She grabbed the gun in both hands and swung to face the new intruder, trying to look as menacing as she could.

Dex Dearborn, his own hand gripping a snub-nosed weapon that looked like something a kid might save cereal box tops to send away for, skidded to a halt in the doorway. He took in the scene - the dripping, stinking, unconscious guard; the bucket rolled away into a corner; the gun which, Polly realised belatedly, she was still pointing straight at him. As she somewhat self-consciously lowered it his bright dark eyes narrowed in amusement, and his mouth split into a broad, relieved grin.

"Looks like I was spot on when I told the guys not to go bursting through any locked doors without checking what's behind them. Nice work, Polly."

She tried to process an overload of contradictory information but only managed a strangled squeak.

He gestured at the gun. "Er, safety-catch?"

She looked rather helplessly down at the unfamiliar weapon. Spotting her difficulty he reached across, took the gun from her unsteady hands, flicked the catch with his thumb, and solemnly handed it back. "Don't forget to take it off if you need to use it. Not that you should have to - the Legion has got the base secured by now."

She gestured shakily at the guard (he had regained consciousness and was regarding then with hostility, though in a prudent silence). "He said - something - I think he wanted to take me somewhere -"

Dex grinned. "Much good that'd have done him. We took out the airstrip first thing."

Something finally got through to her. "We? The Legion? Dex - is Joe here?"

She must stink - she looked like a slattern, her hair was hanging in rattails round her face - for Joe, who was always smooth, always polished, always controlled to see her like this was an abomination, insupportable -

There must have been some half-hysterical hint of all that in her voice - certainly Dex's expression changed, became wary, shuttered. "No, he's - " he saw the guard blinking up at them from the floor and obviously changed what he'd been going to say in a hurry. "He's not been heard from for some time, actually. But I'm sure that he's fine. He must be." His tone spoke doubt; his eyes - hidden from the guard's scrutiny as Dex leant over towards her - flashed a desperate warning. Going along with his unspoken plea she let the hysterical note in her voice become more overt - it was scary how easy that was, even if not for the reason she wanted the guard to perceive.

"Dex! God, Dex, you can't mean Joe's missing?"

"Ssh!" Dex's finger went to his lips. "Morale."

At that moment, right on cue, came the sound of heavy boots from the corridor. Dex raised his voice. "Milo? That you? In here."

The new arrival had swarthy skin, dark hair, a pronounced shadow of blue-black round chin and jowls, and a strong Bronx accent. His glance flashed around the cell. "You found her? Good work, Dex, for pulling her out."

Dex shrugged with an easy assurance. "I reckon I was a day late and a dollar short, actually. Polly was nine parts of the way through freeing herself when I showed up. I reckon it's this guy we both rescued." He gestured towards the prisoner, who appeared to find it his cue to let loose a torrent of abuse.

Milo - if that was his name - raised his eyebrows with an air of studied boredom. "That so? Well, I suppose he looks like that kind of sap. I'll take him to join the others, then."  
He disentangled Polly's captive from the doorknob and dragged him off somewhere, gesturing violently with his gun. Polly looked ferociously across at Dex.

"Well," she said. "Joe. Give. Did they shoot Joe down, then?"

Dex took a sharp in-drawn breath and drew back half a pace. She gave herself a mental shake. To be fair, she had never intended brutality, and felt a pang of guilt at his reaction.  
She had been angry, true, but Joe was golden - no, more, indestructible - no barbed words could shake him at least.

"I'm sorry," she added rapidly.

Dex's face was closed. "They thought they had. But they hadn't. But he'll be safer if they carry on thinking they have."

She nodded. Of course. A deception. Joe was so good at them, and of course he would have enlisted Dex to play along.

"Anyway," Dex said with formal courtesy, "would you assist us in cleaning out this base? We need to find out what we're doing here. What the bad guys have been doing. And we could use an expert photographer, if you feel up to it."


	19. Polly realises there is more to Dex than meets the eye

Polly roused herself eventually; sticky and creased from sleeping in her clothes, and with a crick in her neck. She had slept, though: the monotonous throbbing of the great engines through the night had its own soporific quality. She found she had been resting her head on Dex's shoulder, which was embarrassing; not that he was the sort to try anything on, of course, not Dex, but the strange other men in the big stripped interior of the plane might not understand that, might draw conclusions about her -

Dex's eyes blinked open as she started to stir; unfairly, he seemed better at coming to himself of a morning after sleeping in strange places at uncovenanted angles. He blinked, once, stretched his eyes, and leaned casually across her to gaze out of the plane window. What he saw was evidently satisfactory; he turned, gave a thumbs-up sign at the nearest of the hulking crew, and turned back towards Polly, displaying a face which revealed not a care in the world.

"Where are we?" she snapped. The rest of the crew, though they were, in this cramped space, all within earshot, left it for Dex to respond. She noted that, in some far part of her brain and it became, in itself a further teeth-grinding moment. He smiled at her.

"Just over upstate New York. I guess we missed the Thousand Islands. But we should be landing in three-quarters of an hour or so. Give or take."

He looked at her as though taking in the full wreckage of her appearance for the first time. She'd found a clean pair of jeans and a sweater which more-or-less fitted on the base, and contrived a wash, but the best she could manage with the hair was to plait it, and God only knew what had happened to her makeup bag and the rest of her luggage. She quailed inwardly, fearing his assessment of her vulnerability, and the contempt which must follow when he sensed it. However, his voice, when he spoke, was very gentle.

"There'll be people to look after you properly at the base. You'll feel different once again when you've had a medical check-over; pancakes and proper coffee, and a bath -"

The inferred intimacy - after all she had gone through - was intolerable.

Without her apparently being able to control it, a crisp, haughty edge insisted on imposing itself on her words. She spat them out with a cold, hating detachment. "How - thorough. And how sweet of the Legion. Why: it sounds almost as if you had a procedure for handling someone newly released from a prison camp."

The silence in the aircraft as the echoes of her comment died away had a quality all its own; a concentrated venom that chilled her blood. None of the men looked at her, but their focussed hostility was as obvious as if they had stared. It would, she thought wildly and irrationally as the truly horrific nature of her gaffe penetrated her consciousness, take little for them to open the hatch of the transport plane, and precipitate her abruptly and without a parachute to the thick woodland passing below.

Dex's voice was studiedly restrained - he did not quite meet her eyes - but she noted that his right hand had spread out horizontally, where the other men could see it, and he was making a small, tamping down gesture: _cool it, guys_. "Well, it has happened before, so - I guess the answer to that would be yes; we have developed SOPs for the situation." He paused. "Part of which is not taking anything released prisoners might say any too personally until we've given them breathing space enough to get their heads straight."

The crew exhaled, as if they had been wound up to fever pitch, and then - stood down. They - she realised now and too late - trusted Dex, respected him, knew him on a level she could never hope to reach. She had seen him as irrelevant - not even cared enough to despise him - a mere mechanic, someone who got his hands dirty, and so made sure her transport worked -

It occurred to her she'd never looked behind the competence, to see if it was a man or a machine fulfilling that function so efficiently. Suddenly she found herself ashamed; simply, desperately, ashamed. Of who she was, and of how she had betrayed who she could have been.

Polly turned towards Dex, buried her face in his shoulder, and - as she had not throughout the whole nightmare of the last ten days - broke down into a howling storm of weeping, while he patted her back nervously, and managed somehow to find a white handkerchief the size of a young bedsheet into which she could absorb her ungainly sniffles.  
She found a still place in the midst of the storm, and willed her voice to be steady. She looked up.

"Dex; I need to tell you what's been going on. If Joe - I mean, I - if you get the chance -"

She was shaking, hiccupping with stress, and the awkwardness of it all, but he was still muttering at her reassuringly, and, to her surprise, stroking his hand in soothing sweeps along her spine, no longer nervously. Part of her brain - the inquisitive part which never actually slept - registered that, contrary to expectations, there was obviously a girlfriend of Dex's out there somewhere who was one lucky, lucky lady - there was nothing inappropriate about the gesture, but it denoted a matter-of-fact confidence about the giving and receiving of physical comfort which she would, previously, have betted was completely foreign to him.

"Go on. If it's that important - and given what they did to you, it must be - I'll undertake to get the news out tonight. Provided we keep this weather window, one of the guys can fly me back the short-hop route via Gander. And I'll airmail the key bits, coded, as back up before we fly. So - come on. Spill."

She looked up at him; thought about exclusives - about scoops - about gratitude - about fates worth than death, and made up her mind. "Look, Dex; it's like this. Here's what I think they've been planning -"

From time to time he interrupted her with questions, or asked her to repeat something. But by and large he was the best of listeners; taking her wholly seriously - his expression showed as much, giving her time to express herself, not diving in with suggestions when she hesitated over the right word or so. His face was grim when she finished, as well it might be.

"Jeez! They're planning on taking out the British Royal Family with _my_ weapon! Are they insane?"

Her face was furrowed with concentration. "Insane, possibly, but not stupid. I mean, there was a lot of stuff about how people felt about the Abdication a few years ago that got kept out of the Press, even in the States. A lot of people thought the Duke of Windsor had been treated pretty shabbily. Or that it was a slap in the face for the Aristocracy in general, I suppose, that the Prime Minister could tell the King who he could and couldn't marry. Whatever the excuse, there's a lot of highly placed people tied up in this one. I don't suppose even the conspirators know who's in and who's out - well, except for the inner circle."

She drew a deep breath. "Once the rioting started no-one would know who to trust - it'd be anarchy. Law and order completely breaking down. And then Mosley's crew would propose they brought back the Duke as the only legitimate King the country had, and the one man who could reconcile the warring factions. It sounds insane, Dex, but they could bring it off. They really could. If only we knew when it was going to happen!"

Dex chewed thoughtfully on a sliver of gum. "Well," he said, "they'd pretty much stripped this base clean. And from what the few goons they'd left behind had to say, they'd been pretty much using this place as the main R&D facility up until a couple of days ago. So I'd say whatever they were planning can't be too far in the future. In fact, it'd probably make sense if it was the next time the family were sure to be together - when they meet up for Christmas at Sandringham, or something."

"But they aren't going to be at Sandringham - the drains are up -" Her voice tailed off as a memory from what felt like years ago hit her - Mosley's face as Lord Peter had casually dropped a titbit of seemingly inconsequential Royal gossip. Not anger at not being in the inner circles, then. Fury at having to revise a long-cherished plan at short notice. Dex had caught her expression, he was waiting for her to speak.

"It is Christmas. And it's Balmoral. It fits - it fits perfectly. But how are they ever going to get at them? I mean - it's a castle - and right in the Scottish highlands. They'd need an army even to get past the outer walls of the estate, and they couldn't avoid being spotted -"

Dex was rummaging through the bundle of papers he'd collected from the office at the base, a jumble of things he'd found interesting, worth taking for further analysis. He pulled out a ledger - it looked like a supply record - flipped it open to a particular page and stabbed down with a stubby forefinger.

"Look here. There's your answer. All these gas cylinders - hundreds of them. We didn't see any on the base; they must have been shipped out. What's the betting that they're on their way to Europe at the moment? And just look what's in them!"

Polly puzzled out the cramped writing. "Helium? What - ? What does helium do?"

Dex's lips curved in a smile that had no mirth in it whatsoever. "Absolutely nothing. It's one of the least reactive substances in the universe." He paused. "Which is what makes it one hell of a sight safer than hydrogen to use in a lighter-than-air craft. Particularly one you're going to be taking into battle." His mouth twisted. "The bastards! They're going to mount the weapon on an airship. That's how they'll take out Balmoral. That's why the conspiracy has so many ex-fighter aces in it, too. They'll need to make sure they can convoy the blimp into position, even if the RAF does manage to scramble anything by way of defence."

She nodded. It all made perfect sense. "So you do have to get back to Joe tonight, and tell him."

"No two ways about it. I'd a lot to do here - but I guess I'll just have to pack a fortnight's work into six hours."

Dex's voice sounded infinitely weary, but then he grinned at her, straightening his shoulders and sitting more upright. "So, no change there, then."

The note of the engines changed; they were beginning to descend towards the Legion's base. He looked at her. "What about you?"

She had been making up her mind over the last few minutes, and though recalling the events of the last couple of weeks made her guts turn to water the enemy could not fracture her resolve to defeat them. In fact, if she needed anything to stiffen her nerve, she could always summon up the obscene gloating in Fischer's face the last time she had seen it. She would live to drive her elegant heel into that face - be it only metaphorically - and she would never surrender.

"I'm going to work on the US end of the conspiracy. There's got to be a whole lot coming out of that - "she nodded towards the heap of paperwork, "that I can tie up with the other stuff I know. That company who own the base in Canada, for example. Who they were getting the helium from - I suppose it isn't the sort of stuff you can buy over the counter in your local drug-store? I can start trying to tie that up with the names I know. F'ristance, what do you know about a Miss O'Farrell?"

The question had caught him off-balance - more than she had expected, actually. His face looked suddenly shuttered. "Why do you ask?" 

A brief flicker of her earlier resentment surfaced. There were secrets here, were there? Well, let him deal with this. She made her face bland and unemotional, as though she were talking of nothing more than whether she wanted cream in her coffee.

"Because she's the one who gave the order to have Joe shot down." 

Dex's face convulsed in a fury so intense that involuntarily she jerked back from him. His hands clenched into fists, and it was obvious that whatever it was he was forcibly preventing himself from saying was hardly fit for mixed company.

After a few seconds, and in a voice whose rigidly level tone spoke of the depth of the fury he was repressing more than if he had shouted, he said, "She was Grogan's girl. She sings at a joint called O'Donnells. And plays politics. Sees herself as some sort of Irish-American Boadicea." He looked rather as though he would have liked to spit. "Unfortunately, a lot of other people see her that way, too. I suppose that's how she managed to get back at Joe. Joe had - you see, Grogan had got something we needed to get back, and he'd given it to Kitty O'Farrell to look after. And Joe - well, he had to pretend to go along with the Irish stuff, so as - so as -"

"So as to charm it out of her?" Her voice dripped sarcasm. "I see. I see a lot. What was it she'd got - the micro-film?"

Dex looked up at her. There was something wounded and infinitely vulnerable in his face. For a moment she wanted to put her arms round him - which was absurd, of course, and would probably have had him leaping out of the 'plane in sheer shock to boot.

"Well - in a manner of speaking." He looked round the interior of the plane. The other men were all at their landing stations, engrossed in the task of bringing the Pig down onto the Legion's base. "Uh, well actually Joe was covering for me there. It wasn't microfilm. Grogan had managed to get hold of - uh - well, anyway, his lot were trying to blackmail me."

"Blackmail you?" Her voice must have risen with the shock; Dex cast another frantic glance towards the other men on the plane, but the increased roar of the engines as the 'plane came down to land successfully shielded their conversation. "What about?" The words were barely out of her mouth - she could see the shock and shame in Dex's face, but even as her curiosity went into overdrive other feelings were surfacing. She put out a hand and patted his arm. "No, I'm sorry. None of my business. Forget I said anything. Well. She doesn't sound like a nice young lady at all. I shall enjoy talking to her, I think."

They were down on the ground at last, taxiing to a stop. Dex - still looking rather shaky - managed a grin. "More than she will, I expect."

And then it was all a whirl of medical checks, and debriefings, frantic telephoning, arguing, and calling in favours. Much later, as she stood on the concrete apron once again waiting to say goodbye to Dex, a thought occurred to her. "What do you think I should do, if you don't manage to stop it?"

He was dressed for a winter crossing of the Atlantic; thick sheepskin jacket, padded gauntlets, thick trousers and boots. Between the upturned collar and the close-fitting helmet nothing could be seen of his face except his eyes. They looked surprised, perhaps at her asking for advice at all, and then calculating.

"Take everything you've found by then, and by hook or crook get it to the President, and convince him to do something. There's no-one else you can risk talking to. This conspiracy has gone too deep." His eyes crinkled up - he was grinning at her behind the upturned collar of his flying jacket. "Mind you, there's no-one I'd be happier to bet on getting into the White House, either. Or talking him into doing what you want. No matter what the enemy throws at you to stop you."

That took her aback. "Tell the President to go to war? Me?"

Dex's voice sounded relaxed; almost as though he were her kid brother and he was teasing her over something that wasn't worth a cent. "Not thinking of passing on your chance of a scoop like that one, Polly?"

He knew her too well, blast him! Even as the sheer audacity of the suggestion had hit her, she'd been mentally composing the paragraph in which she'd describe being in the Oval Office on the cusp of history to the _Chronicle_ 's readers. She snorted. "Heck of a way to expect him to have to start the first month of his first term, isn't it?"

Dex's face - the little she could see of it - looked dumbfounded. "Jeez! I'd completely forgotten about the election - how wrapped up in yourself do you have to be to forget something like that? I'd guess I'd just gotten so used to thinking of Roosevelt in the White House - seems like the guys been there forever. So, you're the journalist. How do you think President Kennedy's going to take it, if you have to tell him?"

Polly paused. She was not one of the _Chronicle_ 's political stars - Paley had other people he used for that, and the briefing rooms and political clubs of New York and Washington were still too much of an all-male preserve for her talents to shine there. But she kept her ears open - one always did - and there were some things she did know.

"It's not good, Dex. I'm not so sure he'd be willing to intervene in Britain - not unless whatever happened there was a direct threat to US interests, anyway. And he'd take a lot of convincing that was true - The Irish angle would give him big problems, if nothing else. He'd not have got in without the Irish-American vote - we were surprised he won anyway, being a substitute candidate and all -"

Her voice tailed off. Given what she now knew, had that car crash back in August which had robbed the Democrats of the well-connected, Europhile, heir-apparent to Roosevelt's presidency been the tragic accident it seemed? How far did the conspiracy reach, after all?

"Anyway, you aren't going to fail," she said, emphasising every word as though she could make them true by sheer force of determination.

The propellers were whirling - the pilot was signalling to Dex to climb aboard. He turned towards her. He almost had to shout to make himself heard. "That other thing - you know? You asked about it when we were on the Pig? I've been thinking. Maybe it isn't fair to keep you in the dark. Look - I'll tell you about it when I get back. At least - what I can. If we both get out of this OK. "

There was not time for more. He turned, pulling his goggles down over his eyes as he did so, starting to climb over the 'plane's wing into the observer's seat. She reached up, caught his shoulder, and as he turned, looking back down, kissed him quickly on the cheek.

"Look after yourself," she said. He must have said something, but it was lost in the wind - the weather was deteriorating, she hoped the pilot knew what he was up to - and in the noise of the engines. They dropped the canopy down, and taxied away from her.

Some time in the middle of the night she woke after a confused dream, and it occurred to her that perhaps she ought to have sent a message to Joe. But it was too late, and in any event she couldn't think of precisely what it was she had wanted to say to him. Eventually, still puzzling away at it, she turned over and slept again.

[ Link to Part IV here ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2428379/chapters/5374193)

**Author's Note:**

> For fanon-related reasons Prohibition is still continuing in America. Characters based on historical originals express views believed to be those of the originals concerned, as they might have been affected by historical shifts.


End file.
